OVP: Cowboy (1958)

Film: Cowboy (1958)
Stars: Glenn Ford, Jack Lemmon, Anna Kashfi, Dick York
Director: Delmer Daves
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

It is a new week, but a week I'm really excited about (I get next week off from work!), and with each new week we get a theme for our weekday reviews, frequently with an Oscar tilt.  This week that is going to be Best Editing, a weird category for us to do a theme week on.  If you follow Best Editing at the Oscars, it's the category most likely to be the result of coattail nominations-indeed, three of our films this week are also Best Picture nominees.  However, to start out the week, we're going to focus on a film that pulled off a weird feat-it was only nominated for Best Editing.  I don't have the exact stats on this, but this is rare, and it made me curious about Cowboy, and why this largely forgotten Glenn Ford western got this one nomination of all things, when I caught it recently as it was leaving Criterion Streaming.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is short, way shorter than you'd expect (it comes in only at 92 minutes, which for a dramatic 50's Technicolor western, is brief).  It helps that we have only two really important characters: Frank Harris (Lemmon), a hotel employee who is desperately in love with Maria (Kashfi), the daughter of a Mexican cattle baron, and Tom Reece (Ford), a rough-talking cattle driver who wants to buy cattle in Mexico after his stint in the hotel from Maria's father.  However, when Tom loses his money in a poker game, Frank gives up his life savings to join the cowboy on his trip to Mexico, in hopes of impressing Maria's father.

This is all the basis of a pretty routine western-an unlikely bronco goes through the ropes of becoming a true cowboy, and thus earning the respect of his reluctant, seasoned partner.  That's not what Cowboy's going for though.  The reason that this got an editing nomination was because of the chase sequences (on train and on horseback) and the difficulty in filming with so many live cattle, and in that way it's fine & works (it's better than a lot of the 1958 nominees, TBH), but it's not revolutionary.  What's fascinating about Cowboy is how deceptively dark it gets in the way that we see Tom try to break sweet, lovable Frank.

We see this in a scene where, during a bit of rough-housing with a rattlesnake, one of the men on the trip die, and Frank is shocked that there isn't more anger for the death of someone on the crew, particularly from Tom.  I initially took this as being just hyper masculinity of the 1950's, but that's not what the writers are going for-Tom is meant to be too harsh, bordering on cruel, and we see that when Frank realizes that Maria has already been married by the time he gets to Mexico, and he becomes bitter, emulating Tom.  When Tom kills a number of cattle while trying to save Frank's life, Frank chastises him and tells him that the cattle are coming out of his share, and starts to treat the men cruelly.

This is really dark in the movie, much darker than you'd expect, and in half of this situation the casting department did an outstanding job.  Lemmon is such an awe shucks sweetheart that watching him become this monster is hard-to-watch, and a testament to the actor he was becoming.  Glenn Ford, though, isn't good at underlining this aspect of his performance, and I spent most of the time wishing we had a performer like Kirk Douglas or Henry Fonda who might have been better at playing the obvious angles of what the writers were attempting to do with the character.  The film isn't brave enough to punish Frank too harshly for his spiral (in the end, both men come away friends and jovial), but there's a really good movie lurking within Cowboy if the casting department and writers had been willing to indulge it.