Film/ 3:10 to Yuma

3:10 to Yuma directed by James Mangold September 2007


As the murderous outlaw, Ben Wade, in James Mangold's masterful remake of "3:10 to Yuma", Russell Crowe purrs his way through a performance so juicy it best reminds one of Lawrence Olivier's off-hand admonition that a great actor must make everyone in the theater want to have sex with him. Christian Bale shows just how spectacularly "little" the little man can be and Peter Fonda is perfection as a virtual personification of the cantankerous and contradictory Wild West.

Hollywood westerns simply are the acknowledged representation of American mythology in all its idealogical promiscuity, opportunism and self-forgiveness. Like the proverbial Melting Pot, these films can accommodate whatever is thrown into them by way of character, theme, circumstance or action, historical or current, fact or fiction.

We have a one-legged veteran of "friendly Civil War fire", mortally harassed by a greedy mortgage lender; the velvety free-spirited thief who is rigorously honest, quotes the Bible, sketches wildlife en pleine aire, and blows up whole trainloads of prospectors; a company-man who sees no wrong in keeping the corporation out of the red, as it were, by literally killing the competition, in this case the indigenous men, women and children who want to live on their own land and are willing to fight for it.

Beautiful Womanhood gets token mention in the cameo roles of the good blond and the bad brunette, united in unanimous endorsement of the vital power and ineffable attraction of evil. The inescapable thrust of the railway, Trojan Horse technology in its 19th century mechanistic avatar; the plight of cheap-labor immigrants; a town that will murder itself for the mere promise of $200.00 and reversals of allegiance and sympathy that ricochet between all the characters draws a seemingly unmistakable connect-the-dot portrait of ourselves.

Mangold goes one thrilling step further lest we think we can wake up the morning after and say it aint so. In the opening scene of the movie Bale's older son is awakened by the wheezing sound of his sickly younger brother. Darkness is shattered by the striking of a match, and we glimpse his bedside reading, Tales of Outlaws of the West. Can we mistake that what we are about to see is already the past?

The boy upholds the long tradition of disobeying the father's command, following the hirelings escorting the captured thief, arriving just in time to save their lives. Despite resourcefulness and spirit the next time he does not succeed and, before his eyes, his father's body is pummeled with bullets. Now everyone else is dead. The boy's gun is trained on the Outlaw; he has only to pull the trigger to claim the future and truly step onto the ambiguous ground that is adulthood. But the trigger is not pulled.

The gun is thrust away and the boy drops to his dying father, whispering last-minute lies of congratulation for an impossible job not actually achieved: placing the prisoner on the 3:10 train to Yuma, for him to be tried and executed. The Outlaw can only deliver himself into the custody of the law, ruing, perhaps, how temporary the inconvenience will be, given the power of money. He knows he has already outlived his era. He whistles to his horse to follow the chugging train, a gesture so quaint it can only bring on a smile.