Dallas (1950)

Film: Dallas (1950)
Stars: Gary Cooper, Ruth Roman, Steve Cochran, Raymond Massey, Barbara Payton, Leif Erickson
Director: Stuart Heisler
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 Ruth Roman-click here to learn more about Ms. Roma (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We start out our monthly focus on Ruth Roman with the genre that she was best known for: westerns.  As we discussed in our kickoff (see link above) to Roman, by 1950 (her first proper annum as a leading woman), she'd had a few years as a supporting player, and had had two big hits in 1949: The Window and Champion, after which she got a long-term contract with Warner Brothers, got the cover of Life Magazine proclaiming "The Progress of a Rising Star: Ruth Roman," and made a bevy of different films, including Dallas, our movie today starring Gary Cooper.  Like many first films in our Saturdays with the Stars profiles, Roman's role here is deceptive to her billing, with Cooper getting almost everything to do despite sharing the top of the banner with his young costar.  It's also, well, kind of an odd movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on Blayde "Reb" Hollister (Cooper, and yes, a moniker that could only exist in a movie), a member of the former confederacy who is such a believably good shot that even Wild Bill Hickok seems to have respect for him, whose family was killed by a group of Northerners during the war.  In the opening scenes, Hollister fakes his own death with Hickok's help, and swaps identities with Martin Weatherby (Erickson), a green-in-the-gills newly-appointed marshall who will surely soon die as he doesn't have the shooting skills or manner to take on such a job.  He got the role to impress his fiancé Tonia (Roman), whose family is being terrorized by the same family that killed Hollister's, the Marlows (headed by Massey's Will, a now "respectable" man who is still just as corrupt as ever).  As the movie unfolds, we see that Tonia is torn for her newfound lust for Reb, as well as her duty to Martin.

The film is odd in the sense that Martin never becomes a villain or ever even a proper adversary of Reb, even though he's clearly got designs on his girl.  There are moments, yes, where he basically hides Reb's papers that would exonerate him for a previous crime (freeing him up to marry Tonia), but there's not a lot of climax to that scene since it's obvious that he'll do the right thing, and he does so in quick succession.  He's certainly not the villain, as that's Massey's Will, a 1950's style nemesis as he's not only cold-blooded but also trying to be "respectable," something that as the decade would wear on would become something we'd see with more frequently-the bad guy who makes his operation legit.

Roman's part is small, as I mentioned above, but it isn't without interest.  Cooper at this point of his career had seen most of his leading man good looks, the kind that made him impossibly seismic back in the 1930's & 40's, start to fade so it's a bit unbelievable that a woman 20 years his junior would so quickly become enamored with a man who looks more like her father than her lover, but she makes the love triangle compelling.  The best part of the movie is that, while you suspect Cooper will get the girl (it's hard to imagine him letting such a thing as the final kiss slip through his contract negotiations), it's not clear the entire movie which guy Tonia will ultimately choose, and I kind of liked that for a western.  Tonia is not a great character, and I hope we'll see more from Roman as this series progresses, but she finds an intrigue in the character that I think someone else would have made one-note.  Honestly, though it feels like the sort of movie that would be easily glossed over in the filmography of an actor as important as Cooper (I don't think I'd ever heard of Dallas before picking it for this series), between the unusual plot beats, the undecided romance, the glossy Technicolor, and some fun side characters (particularly Barbara Payton's fiery "mob mol" trope-character), this isn't a bad way to spend an afternoon.