3:10 to YumaDirector: James Mangold. Screenplay: Halsted Welles, Michael Brandt, Derek Haas, based on a short story by Elmore Leonard. Cinematography: Phedon Papamichael. Film editing: Michael McCusker. Production design: Andrew Menzies. Music: Marco Beltrami. Producer: Cathy Conrad. With: Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Logan Lerman, Dallas Roberts, Ben Foster, Peter Fonda, Vinessa Shaw, Alan Tudyk, Luce Rains, Gretchen Mol, Lennie Loftin, Rio Alexander, Johnny Whitworth, Shawn Howell, Pat Ricotti, Ramon Frank, Deryle J. Lujan, James Augure, Brian Duffy, Jason Rodriguez, Kevin Durand, Chris Browning, Chad Brummett, Forrest Fyre, Genjamin Petry, Arron Shiver, Sean Hennigan, Girard Swan, Christopher Berry. USA. 121 min. 2007.
By Jeremy Sterritt
“3:10 to Yuma” has Russell Crowe delivering one of his finest performances to date as Ben Wade, a bad-to-the-bone killer and wildly successful thief who falls completely, head-over-heels in love (handcuffed on his way to Yuma’s eponymous prison train) with hop-a-long sad-sack and very unsuccessful rancher Dan Evans, played by Christian Bale, who again delivers proof positive that he's one of the finest actors we've got.
But before getting into “3:10 to Yuma,” let’s flash back to “The Magnificent Seven” for perspective. That classic 1960 western opens with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen witnessing something that everyone publicly agreed was just not right: the refusal of ignorant, podunk townsfolk to integrate their scraggly cemetery and allow the willing-but-terrified undertaker to bury some very nice dead Mexicans alongside their equally dead white kin. Brynner boldly declares that he’ll drive the gaudy hearse and brave a gauntlet of small-minded people, no matter how armed and angry they are, but he’ll need someone to ride shotgun. Cue McQueen: “I’ll do it.”
This all goes down in the middle of town on a fine sunny day. Let me paint the picture: Brynner, not a speck of dust on him, is in black ... shiny black: black hat, black shirt, and a crotch-hugging gun belt that could have been painted on. McQueen is in a white hat, neckerchief, and honest-to-goodness chaps. The two have been, as they say, “cruising” each other from the very first frame--McQueen in a classic hustler’s pose, wares on display; Brynner giving the eye, then the hat-touch, et cetera. Senator Craig could explain this ritual much better than I, but the point is that this is a sexually charged scene in a movie with many more to come. And here’s the bombshell: It’s not gay.
Westerns for the most part exist in a world without women. This became increasingly the case in postwar America, where men were men and conformity was king. In the mainstream suburban zeitgeist that dominated the 1950s -- the age of the company man, the nation steeped in a state-sponsored code of conduct -- the popular imagination’s capital-M Man was strong, silent, unassuming, bold; he slept at least three feet away from his wife and shook hands with his sons. Of course that’s not how things really were, behind closed doors, downstairs in the rumpus room. But such was the era’s pattern for manliness; not so much a set of expectations as a notion of what men should be like, or aspire to be like. It was the norm. And never was there a time when American society cared more about being normal than the 1950s, when a growing middle class, pinioned between prosperity and the specter of nuclear Armageddon, chose collectively to not rock the boat. Television -- the latest craze -- sealed the deal. On the news, viewers could daily see fellow normal-seeming Americans singled out, condemned, ostracized, and forced from their livelihoods as censorship and the rooting out of sedition became a national pastime of sorts. After the news, sitcoms entertained the masses with comic stories of superlatively normal families flying into hysterics and panic because the boss is coming to dinner for a spot-check inspection of compliance with the white picket fence, 2.3 children, and missus-and-a-meatloaf protocols of normalcy.
The 1950s’ idée fixe of men being strong and silent was a fraud, a mask of sham dignity that rewarded conforming, keeping in line, accepting the status quo. Being strong and silent meant keeping quiet and keeping it together while bearing up under the prescribed responsibilities of not just having and providing for a family, but making sure that family appeared happy and normal, which no family ever has been. These were the tasks for John Q. Notacommunist in Levittown, but his victories, if they could be called that, were hollow; his successes were accomplished by not doing things, and his very manhood was defined by, of all things, submission. Being strong and silent wasn’t an ideal, it was a demand.
But in the wild west, where each man made his own way and lived by his own rules, a man was free. The wild west was a place where men lived by their own codes, answered to no one, and faced death and danger every day. Foregoing the comforts of prosperity and family and escaping the responsibility of same, western heroes had something the 1950s guy sorely lacked: a chance to prove themselves as men.
Now back to “3:10 to Yuma,” the story of Dan Evans, an Arizona rancher without a prayer. Dan is a victim, or if they kept figures for such things in the Old West, a statistic. The Civil War took his leg and left him a carpet-bagging Yankee in rough-and-tough frontier-time Arizona. Drought and Manifest Destiny have it in for Dan. It hasn’t rained for months and the local plutocrat, in a railroad-is-coming land-grab, has choked off his water supply, burned his barns, and rustled his cattle in the time-honored tradition of keeping a good man down.
After witnessing outlaw Ben Wade’s umpteenth stagecoach robbery-slash-Pinkerton humiliation, Dan finds himself mano-a-mano with the legendary bandit three times in one day. Even though Wade treats Evans marginally better than his neighbors and family do, Evans agrees to help escort the desperado to Justice -- i.e., the 3:10 train to Yuma prison -- for $200 cash on the barrelhead. Sure, the money would see the Evans clan through the winter, but Dan’s gambit is more likely to cost him, his wife, and their two sons their lives than buy their way into high society. Proud but not reckless, Dan has motives that are anything but clear. It seems bleakly possible that he is gambling everything he has on a slim-to-nil chance to do what’s right.
“3:10 to Yuma” is based on an Elmore Leonard story, though, and so we know that “right” is not automatically on the side of the law. Whether a matter of honor or high jinks, in a Leonard story “right” must be mathematically irreducible and morally unavoidable when things finally shake out. So until the denouement of “3:10 to Yuma,” we have sufficient information only to know that Evans isn’t motivated by the $200. Nor is it anything personal between Evans and Wade (or Evans and his wife or Evans and his bitter eldest son). Our best bet is that what Dan Evans signs on for is a chance to examine all these things and more, concentrated into a single existential trail ride. Dan Evans needs to find himself, and what better way to do so than a road trip? And at the very least, this road trip offers two concrete and simple consolation prizes for Dan if things don’t work out perfectly: fiscal solvency or death.
Over the course of “3:10 to Yuma,” as Wade’s vengeful posse -- and a world of hurt -- gains on the unfortunate and shrinking band of first- and part-time lawmen escorting him, we learn very little in the way of new information. Wade, who is all swagger and (yes) glamour, gets scuffed and tarnished a bit. Evans, whose poker face is a cypher even to himself, reveals a few more of the numbers in his inner journey’s equation, the sum of which will determine once and for all his worth. Sometimes he glows a little.
What we know about both men is that no matter how hard you hit them, they don’t go down. For rock star Ben Wade there’s such a long way to fall that he can’t even see it as a possibility. Evans, though, has spent a lifetime mere angstroms from rock bottom, and is still, in his way, plummeting; making that train is his Everest. What allows this odd pairing to recognize something more than stubbornness in each other -- and, subsequently, to go gooey over one another -- is perhaps their defining shared characteristic: confidence in their own abilities. This is not cocksureness; Wade is winningly modest in his success, and Evans’s sole vote of confidence is his own. But it’s this confidence -- self-confidence -- that is the cornerstone of the bond Wade and Evans come to share. Perhaps more accurately, it is the currency they trade in; ultimately, Wade draws deeply from his overflowing coffers to fill Evans’s near-empty ones. Every man has a price, but heroes are not supposed to.
“3:10 to Yuma” illustrates, with surprising and welcome economy of language and style, that every man is a hero and that no man is. “3:10 to Yuma” is an existential negotiation between two men as they haggle over the price tag of life and death. They agree on terms that are exactly commensurate with each man doing what he needs to do to be okay with himself. Earning the respect of each other, Wade and Evans confirm their worth and reaffirm their right to respect themselves as men. “3:10 to Yuma” is about midlife crisis in the Wild West.
Jeremy Sterritt is Proprietor and Film Critic of RadioOpticon - am1020 whdd - robinhoodradio.com.
