Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 1-November-09
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Four Faces West (1948)

Although it is based on a novella by Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Four Faces West feels like it was written for actor Joel McCrea. A popular leading man best known for his westerns, McCrea brought an almost unparalleled degree of uprightness and masculine affability to his roles. He is a perfect fit for Ross McEwen, the honest but hard-strapped hero of Rhodes' tale. In the amusing introduction, McEwen rides into a New Mexico town while the locals are fêting Pat Garrett, the famous lawman who killed Billy the Kid, and withdraws two thousand dollars from the bank at gunpoint. He gallops off with a posse at his heels and hops a train after being bitten by a rattlesnake. But he does not look or act like your average desperado. He leaves an IOU at the bank, signed "Jefferson Davis" but still binding in his mind, and mails the money to his father. He also pauses during flight to court a nurse whom he meets on the train (Frances Dee). She realizes that he must be the felon everybody is talking about but, having eyes to see, falls for him anyway.

A male passenger from the train (Joseph Calleia) also figures out that McEwen is on the lam. He represents the weak link in the story because his part never gels. It is as if the filmmakers held Calleia in reserve so he could turn out either wicked or faithful depending on how studio heads or test audiences reacted to the plot. Conversely, shrewd-faced character actor Charles Bickford scores a hit as Garrett, a good man and a determined one. He pursues his quarry so relentlessly that in one memorable scene McEwen swaps his horse for an unbroken steer to make his tracks harder to read. (We have all heard of bull-riding, but this is something else altogether!) The defining moment comes when McEwen stops to make another swap at a corral and discovers a Mexican family wasted by diphtheria. He decides to care for them at the risk of his own life, now threatened by both contagion and harsh Western justice. Garrett finds him tending the sickbeds and grasps what sort of person he is. McEwen's fiancée arrives in time to witness how the situation is resolved. The crux of Four Faces West (an unlikely title for this film) is that the West was wild but its men could be decent, which is just the kind of message McCrea was born to deliver.

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