On the one hand, it's filled with some of the most familiar features Western fans expect to see in their movies -- a brave lawman, conniving villains, a plucky heroine, cattle drives, horses, trains and shootouts. In fact, Dodge City's 1939 release not only signaled a return to box-office success and more respectability for the genre, it pretty much set out what a good Western would need to catch audiences eyes for something like the next 50 years.
The odd feel comes from watching the actors -- they're a decade earlier than the best-known Western stars like John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart. Character actors from the Western's two-decade mid-century reign like Alan Hale, Sr., and Ward Bond appear, but in smaller roles and wearing much younger faces than the craggy or crusty visages they showed in their usual jobs as the "characters" who got the best laugh lines. It's like we're seeing unfamiliar faces in familiar places.
Swashbuckling ladies man Errol Flynn trades in his ship and sword for a horse and a six-gun in his first Western as Wade Hatton, an Irish-born adventurer who's found a life he likes working cattle drives in the 1860s and 1870s. The drives bring cattle up from Texas to where the eastern railroad ends -- the Kansas town of Dodge City, where they're loaded onto trains to be carried back east. As a consequence of big money, somewhat rowdy characters and people eager to prey on both, Dodge is a largely lawless community. The city fathers would like to curtail the activity that's made their town the "wide-open Babylon of the American frontier," but they don't have the force. The only strong man in town, unscrupulous cattle baron Jeff Surrett (Bruce Cabot), doesn't mind the lawlessness as long as he has the chance to get his cut of the profits.
They approach Hatton, but he doesn't want to get involved until the tragic consequences of the chaos hit him square between the eyes. Teaming with his deputies Rusty and Tex (longtime Flynn co-stars Hale and Guinn Williams, respectively), he sets about to tame Dodge City, while trying to win the affections of Abbie Irving (Olivia de Havilland), the niece of the town's doctor who is almost as put off by Hatton's stern but necessary tactics as she is by the lawless men he fights.
Dodge City is almost like a bridge between the Western's older silent-movie reign and the celebrated, mocked, revised but always relevant format from the later half of the 20th century. We see the features we'll see many more times, but some of the costuming recalls the earlier time. Although Flynn sports nothing like along the lines of the usual Tom Mix outfit, he still wears an almost-ridiculously large hat. Most of the six-gun holsters are higher on the leg and more towards the front, rather than the lower-riding side rigs customary later. Shirts and pants come from a little more homespun cloth, but still look pretty clean and well-stitched for the 1870s. One of the earlier films using the then-new Technicolor process, it showcased the wide-open scenery for which Westerns became known.
Flynn and de Havilland work together for the fifth time in Dodge City and third time as the lead couple -- they have no problem walking the familiar trail of people who are at first interested in one another, divided by circumstance and then thrown together by new circumstances that engender the relationship that we (and the scriptwriter) knew was in their future. They don't repartee at the pace of Bogart and Bacall, Powell and Loy or Grant and Russell, but they're better than most and a lot of fun to watch. Cabot adds a little dimension to the villain role, bringing Surrett a some charisma -- another development that would continue in the new heyday of the Western.
So Dodge City is interesting not only as a bridge and as the opening of the Western's new era of dominance -- John Wayne broke through the same year with Stagecoach and Jimmy Stewart played in his first Western, Destry Rides Again -- but it's a fun movie in its own right too.
(ETA -- Not sure why this didn't publish on Thursday, so here's a "reprint")
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