Cowboy (1958) - full review!
Directed by Delmer Daves, and adapted from Frank Harris’s book My Reminiscences as a Cowboy by Dalton Trumbo (Roman Holiday (1953)) and Edmund North (Patton (1970)), this Western is worth a look despite the odd casting which includes Jack Lemmon in the title role as Harris, and Dick York (who would become TV's original Darrin Stephens on Bewitched) as a womanizing trail hand named Charlie. Glenn Ford is hardly out of place as the hard nosed cattle drive master, Tom Reese. Marlon Brando's wife Anna Kashfi plays Maria Vidal, the Mexican woman who's the object of Harris’s affections; Donald Randolph plays her disapproving father Senor Vidal. Brian Donlevy plays a stereotypical quick draw lawman, Doc Bender, who joins the cattle drive as a trail hand because he's tired of everyone gunning for him. Victor Manuel Mendoza plays Reese's dependable right hand man Paco, aka Ramrod. World War II film veteran Richard Jaeckel plays Paul Curtis, another trail hand whose careless act with a rattlesnake leads to the death of a wagon driver, played by an uncredited Strother Martin. King Donovan plays another veteran trail hand, Joe Capper. William Lyon and Al Clark earned an Academy Award nomination for Editing.
At the end of a long cattle drive, Tom Reese (Ford) and his crew descend upon a Chicago hotel whose manager, Mr. Fowler (Vaughn Taylor) is prepared for them. He informs his newest employee, Frank Harris (Lemmon), that everyone on the second floor of the hotel must be relocated for Reese and company. Frank is reluctant to do this because he's fallen in love with one of the occupants in a suite on that floor, Maria Vidal (Kashfi), daughter of Senor Vidal (Randolph). However, Frank had expressed his affections for Maria in a poem and her father had intercepted it. Wanting none of these entrapments for his daughter, Senor Vidal decides that they must leave anyway. On the way out of the hotel, cattleman Vidal greets his former acquaintance Tom Reese, and the two tentatively agree to a future business arrangement. Reese is used to getting what he wants from his men and with his money, and is impatient with anything but the very best service from the hotel's employees. While his men party the night away, Reese gambles away so much of his money that he excuses himself at the poker table in order to pay his hotel bill, before he's completely busted. Frank, who'd earlier expressed his grandiose ideas about becoming a cowboy to Reese but had been "shot down", finds himself in the enviable position of being able to stake Reese's comeback in the poker game. Reese, desperate to get back in the game, agrees to let Frank come along on their next trip. However, as he and his men prepare to leave early the next day, Reese is upset that Frank catches up with them, insisting that he's a partner on their drive from Mexico and Senor Vidal's ranch. Since he'd given Frank his word (e.g. his bond!), Reese permits the greenhorn to join them, but it's obvious that he's going to make it tough going for the young man.
The rest of the film deals with the complex relationships between the men and their master, Reese, as well as the evolving relationship between he and Frank, which by the end becomes one of mutual respect. Though the men work as a team by day, they are individuals who are free to get themselves into, and out of, trouble by themselves at night. At first, Frank does not understand the code, particularly when Curtis's careless act causes the wagon driver's death. But after they get to Guadalupe and Senor Vidal's ranch, where he finds that Maria has been forced into a marriage with Don Manuel Mendoza (Eugene Iglesias), Frank adopts Reese's hard attitude with a vengeance. On the drive, when Reese is injured, Frank becomes the hard nosed, seemingly unfeeling, cattle drive master. In a sense, the character of Maria is a Hitchcock-like McGuffin because the meat of the story (if you'll pardon the pun) is the cattle drive and the type of men one finds on it.
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