Along the Great Divide (1951)

Film: Along the Great Divide (1951)
Stars: Kirk Douglas, Virginia Mayo, John Agar, Walter Brennan
Director: Raoul Walsh
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Virginia Mayo-click here to learn more about Ms. Mayo (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We continue our month devoted to the career of Virginia Mayo this week with a film that I had never heard of from her filmography before I started researching, and honestly even after I researched her a bit, this was one that slipped by me.  However, as one of the films I wanted to profile fell through (thanks a lot, Amazon Prime), I decided to add this since it was randomly available on streaming (thanks a lot iTunes!).  The movie is actually more significant to Kirk Douglas than Mayo, as it was his first ever western, a genre that would become a cornerstone of his career, and he decidedly has the lead even though he shares top billing with Mayo.  Mayo, though, is well-served in the film, particularly considering the pedigree of Raoul Walsh behind the camera, the man she worked with most in her career (making four pictures together).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers on upstanding Marshall Len Merrick (Douglas), a man of the old west who has recently come to the area as a lawman and stops the lynching of a suspected murderer Keith (Brennan), who is being hanged by the family members of the dead man whom Keith claims he didn't kill.  Merrick forces them to hand over Keith so he can bring him to have a proper trial-by-jury, but the men pursue Merrick & his deputies throughout the desert as they try to return to civilization.  Along the way, the group is joined by Keith's tomboy daughter Ann (Mayo), who initially mocks Merrick but they slowly begin to fall in love.  As the film progresses, we get a twist (that if you were paying attention at all you'd have figured out in the opening frames), and as a result Keith is exonerated and Ann & Merrick get to (literally) ride off into the sunset together.

The film is brief, clocking in at just 88 minutes, and this ends up being a relatively wise decision.  The story here is sparse, with the love story getting short shift perhaps because Mayo & Douglas's chemistry works better when they're fighting, and so there isn't much need for an extra twenty minutes of wooing.  Still, Walsh is a proper director (the man behind White Heat, which he did with Mayo and High Sierra is no one's idea of a hack), and you get some really gorgeous shots of the desert, as well as a strong bit of leading work from Kirk Douglas & Mayo.

Douglas is not my favorite movie star, but he was in so many films that occasionally he pops for me (I feel similarly about Burt Lancaster), and this is one of those roles.  I love the tortured look he gets when he must condemn Keith at the trial, having to relive the melancholy that happened when he had previously damned his own father.  He also gets to have a weirdly homoerotic relationship with his deputy (played by John Agar) that shows perhaps the lonely desert roads might have taken a tour through Brokeback Mountain.  All-in-all, it's a fun role, and it's easy to see why westerns became a hallmark of his career.  Mayo is also good, sinking her teeth into her country girl role, and doing quite well with the big dramatic scene at the end of the picture where she tells off Merrick.  Next week we'll get to the Walsh/Mayo reunion I had planned on investigating during this month, but for now I'm glad that I caught Along the Great Divide, a pretty solid western where pretty much everyone rises above the material to produce a succinct picture.