GOING DUTCH: THREE TEN TO YUMA

WARNING SPOILERS ALL AROUND FOR SHORT STORY AND BOTH FILMS.

The Three Ten To Yuma became the first story of Elmore Leonard’s to be adapted into a film. It also became one of two of his works that Hollywood adapted twice. Both took liberties with the story as they expanded it.

Published by Dime Western in 1953, Leonard’s short story begins with Deputy Marshal Paul Scallen riding into the town of Contention with Jim Kidd, a convicted robber and murderer. At the Commercial Hotel, they meet up with Wells Fargo agent Timpey, who delivers most of the exposition. He has gotten them a room as Scallen requested, Ben Moons, the bother of a man Kidd killed lives in Contention and is out for blood, and there’s a good chance some of Kidd’s gang are here to free him. Scallen tells him they will be waiting up in the room before he has to take Jim Kidd to the station for the three-ten to Yuma train.

The majority of Leonard’s story takes place in that hotel room where he uses dialogue like a master craftsman. When Scallen gets Kidd inside, he puts him on the bed and takes a chair across the room with his shotgun. He then informs him what will happen if he closes in on the seven feet between them. When Kidd makes an attempt, he gets the gun’s stock upside his head for the trouble, but accepts it amicably. He then asks the deputy what he makes and Scallen tells him one-hundred and fifty a month basically. Kidd pushes him about how little that is. Before the outlaw can make an offer, Scallen says, “Have you figured out what my price is?”

Scallen then tells Kidd he has none.

Author Reavis Wortham (The Red River Series and Comancheria) believes Leonard’s style contributes the story. “He’s sparse in details and concentrates on the tension and dialogue, leaving descriptions of the land and the men themselves to be filled in by our imaginations.”

Soon Dick Moon comes in to kill Kidd. Scallen takes care of the situation. By then it’s time to take Kidd to the station where several members of his gang are waiting. Kidd mentions the irony of Scallen’s job of saving his life so he can take him to Yuma to hang.

“The violence adds to the story at just the right time, and arrives in a flash,” Wortham explains. “It isn’t overdone, but there is enough to demonstrate how dangerous the world can be at any given time."

You can see Leonard’s influences. Paul Scallen exudes the Hemingway hero. He is all about the job, cool under pressure, and doesn’t pontificate. He holds fears, but they are under control. There is a moment where he thinks of his wife, but pushes it out of his mind, knowing it could interfere with his task. Leonard admitted that one of his favorite westerns, High Noon, could have been in his subconscious when writing it with the determined hero against the odds and the ticking clock.

“It’s character is what it all boils down to.” Joe Lansdale, famed author of dozens of novels including the westerns The Magic Wagon and Paradise Sky,  says. “Rising above fear and still trying to do the right thing even in the face of terrible odds."

The Three-Ten To Yuma may be his best executed short story. There is not an extraneous word. We learn everything about Scallen and Kidd in the exchange where Kid sizes up the deputy for a bribe.

“All of his dialogue hammers the reader with tight back and forth exchanges,” Wortham says. “They have a rhythm that mixes tension and humor, which is so conversational (get it?) that we feel as if the players are real.”

As they continue to talk both the tension in the story and respect each have for one another build toward the showdown and the last line of dialogue that works so well.

“Leonard was a master at brevity, but concentrates on the tangible danger that awaits offscreen, so to speak.” Reavis explained about of the strengths of his writing. “That danger comes alive in both movies, though, and it’s that constant pressure that makes it work.

The 1957 original directed by Delmer Daves and written by Halstead Wells expands the short story and looks deeper into the relationship between captor and prisoner. Leonard’s story roughly starts halfway through the movie. We also spend more time with the two, both together and seperate. Writer and director use the setup to examine masculinity in one of the most masculine of genres.

The biggest change is in the Scallen character, now known as Dan Evans. Instead of a deputy, he’s a struggling rancher who takes the job as escort for two hundred dollars to keep him afloat until the fall, believing it will rain. He’s more cautious and plagued with self doubt than his short story counterpart. If he were cast in the way Leonard wrote him, he would be played by Audie Murphy, Joel MaCrea, or Randolph Scott. Here he’s played by Van Heflin, who Lansdale described as “The most pitiful looking man” and played a similar role four years earlier in Shane.

“Actually, that was a good move,” Lansdale says, “because it made the choices he made more valuable and showed where he just might tip the scales the wrong way.”

The outlaw, name changed to Ben Wade, is brilliantly cast with Glenn Ford. Mainly known for playing likable, professional everymen, we immediately connect with him, even while robbing the stage in the film’s beginning. He is at his most charismatic, quietly oozing virility with the two female co-stars, Felicia Farr, playing a barmaid whose tryst Wade has with delays him enough in town to get arrested, and Leora Dana as Dan Evans wife, covering her attraction to Wade with disdain.

Dan and his two boys are witnesses to the stage coach robbery and Moon’s murder. Ben takes their horses and scatters their cattle to slow them down in going to Bisbee for a posse. The boys appear to be disappointed in their father for not doing anything.

Dan’s emasculation continues as he goes to Bisbee to ask for another loan from the bank to stay solvent. When he visits the banker in the saloon, he’s confronted with Wade after his time with the barmaid. He sees an opportunity to stall Wade for the marshal in a dialogue exchange that Leonard could have wrote. He struggles for composure as he continues to bring up reasons for compensation from his cattle from being scattered.  When Ben asks him if there’s anything else, Dan says, “You can give me two more dollars for making me nervous.”

By that time the marshal has the drop on him.

The law and stage line concoct a plan to get Ben out of Bisbee and to Yuma prison without his gang springing him along the way. They make it look like they are carrying him on the stage to the prison, but they will pull a switch at the Evans Ranch and Dan will take him to Contention along with the stage agent, Butterfield, and the only other man to volunteer, Ernie Jones, the town drunk.

When they get to Contention, the rest plays out much like the short story with a few exceptions. Heflin injects more frayed nerves in his exchanges with his prisoner. Wade brings up the bribe and the impossible odds more in their conversation and Evans wrestles with it more. Instead of a man doing his professional duty, it’s about a man rising to the occasion. When Dan’s wife comes to Contention, he must follow through due to the sacrifice he’s seen in others. The final showdown also plays out differently with Richard Jaeckel playing, the second in command, Charlie Prince, with a sociopathic edge.

Delmer Daves and cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr. bring an understated and elegant look to the movie. The black and white photography has a silver element that pops from the grays. The measured use of shadows and double framing give a claustrophobic feel, even though most of is done in two-shots and masters to capture the performances. There is a gorgeous close up on Ford and Farr as Ben Wade works his seduction. While not prominent, Daves populates Contention with Hispanic people and gives the town a Mexican element found in many of Leonard’s westerns.

“There are no “long take” or “tracking shots” in the film, but it seems to be through a masterful sequence of complex, edited scenes that seems to draw the viewer into the screen.” Wortham notes. “Many of those shot from the character’s point of view, harkening back to a scene in the John Wayne movie, Cahill, U.S. Marshal, where we look down Wayne’s arm as he takes aim to shoot an outlaw.”

When James Mangold, director of some of the best “dad movies” in the last few decades, saw Daves film in the eighties, he thought of a remake someday. He was taken by its tension and moral quandary. He explained he approached it as remounting a revival of a play, retelling the story with a modern attitude and techniques.

The result is more of a remake of Daves’ movie than a reinterpretation of Leonard’s story. Enough of the original film’s plot and dialogue are used that Halstead Wells gets a co-writing credit. New writers Michael Brandt and Derek Haas (with an uncredited Stuart Beattie), along with Mangold expand the tale with more characters, plot points, and themes.

Reavis Wortham prefers the remake to the original. “That comes from the film aspect of Super 35, a 2.40:1 ratio that allowed the director to match the wide-screen scenes in the original black and white film. In my opinion, the acting and style brings a different slow build that crests, then mellows before cresting again. The shootout in town is fascinating to me."

Joe is of a different opinion. “Hollywood hyped it up and I never bought the bad guys transition.” 

Once again, the major change is the man on the side of the law. The new Dan Evans (Christian Bale) lost his leg fighting for the Union. His desperate circumstances are even worse with a greedy banker who owns the land next to him, cutting off his access to water. The film starts with the banker’s thugs setting his barn on fire. His oldest son William, doesn’t hide his contempt for his old man who is slow to fight.

The script and actor Russell Crowe portray Ben Wade as coming to terms with yet growing weary of being a bad man. His Wade walks with a lowkey affability that can snap to dark violence at any moment. Mangold uses Crowe’s movie star persona, at its height at the time.

You can tell from the stage robbery we are in an early 2000a movie where everything bigger and louder. Mangold plays it out in fast edits and tight close up action in a chase that even has a Gatling gun on the wagon and an exploding horse. Wade’s second in command, Charlie Prince, kills at least three people in the robbery. Played broadly psychotic by Ben Foster, the movie expands the character into the main antagonist. He shoots as much as he talks and he talks a lot.

Most of the plot plays out the same with Mangold adding more on the journey to Contention. More characters are also on it with Alan Tudyk, pitch hitting in a performance as Doc Potter, a veterinarian who takes the place of Ernie Jones, Pinkerton Byron McElroy played by Peter Fonda leaning into his best grizzled and cantankerous, as well as the banker’s thug who set fire to Dan’s barn.

William runs away to along with the party. Mangold said he wanted to show tension between fathers and sons and the difficulty in instilling values in an offspring in a world of flashy bad examples.

He also uses the journey to shoehorn in many western tropes. The group confronts renegade Apaches and some rough railroad men. It seems that when any director after 1980, outside of Clint Eastwood, gets a chance to make a western, they shove everything in since they may not get the chance to make another.

When they get to Contention, few are people are left. Charlie Prince rides in with the gang and offers two hundred dollars to those who will kill any of Ben Wade’s captors, causing the local law to back off. The climax is a huge, kinetic shootout with Dan running Ben through the town, dodging and firing bullets. Mangold and the writers drop in a fun twist with the two reaching the station and the 3:10 being late.

Being about a half hour longer than Daves' film, Mangold’s becomes less tight and more sprawling, an expansion of an expansion. Since much of the dialogue and conflict between the two men has taken place on the ride, there is little tension in the hotel before the climax. Mangold also decides to jettison the confrontation with Dick Moon from Leonard’s story and the first film, where the two briefly find themselves on the same side for the first time. For me this dilutes the tension, but Reavis Wortham has a counter opinion. “In my opinion, it helps fill out the background Leonard was unable to describe in the short story. It’s the film version of “novelization.” In this longer journey, we understand the motivation of Dan Evans, though Ben Wade is still fuzzy in many ways, and that’s what makes the entire movie work.”

The remake also suffers in its tension with emotions and themes, often making the subtext text like Dan has with his wife, “I’m tired of the way my boys won’t look at me and you do.”

Mangold has stated he had problems with Daves film where Dan gives a speech to his wife of why he is making a walk to the train station. It is one of the few moments where the filmmakers state the theme and Mangold found it hokey. However, the remake's parallel scene with Dan and his son is more cynical and shows less respect for Dan. First, he gets several concessions from Butterfield, including upping his fee to a thousand and somehow getting him water rights from the banker (it’s rather unclear if that’s in the stage agent’s power). He then tells his son to remember it was his old man who put Ben Wade on that train, making us feel that he is doing it more out of ego than duty.

Elmore Leonard had a problem with both of the film’s endings. In his story, Kidd jumps into the caboose with Scallen because so many bullets are flying that one could hit him. Daves and Halstead have Ben Wade jump in one of the train’s cars mainly out of respect for Dan, telling him he’s busted out of Yuma before. Some find Mangold’s version hard to swallow. When Dan gets Ben to the train, Charlie Prince kills the rancher with several bullets. Ben then guns down Prince and the rest of his gang before hopping back on the train and going back to Yuma.

Wortham defends this decision. “Ben Wade is a sociopath, though he values loyalty and professionalism, and using his own warped, personal logic, morality. It was a shift in loyalty, from his own gang who fails to read his mind at the very end. He kills them through his own sense of guilt and anger, demonstrating once again his own personal logic based on some psychological origin, we aren’t privy to.”

No surprise, Joe differs. “He just seems to change because his panties are too tight. Totally unbelievable, though the way he played the part, the right ending might not have worked either. Enough. The original story, the original film, and that's all there is to it.”

I wished either filmmaker found a way to utilize the last line and moment from Leonard’s story-

Kidd studied the deputy for some minutes, Finally he said, “You know, you really earn your hundred and a half.”

Scallen heard him, though the iron rhythm of the train wheels and his breathing were loud in his temples. He felt as if all his strength had been sapped, but he couldn’t help smiling at Jim Kidd. He was pretty much thinking the same thing.

-written by Scott Montgomery