NOTE: I've been feeling a bit down lately so we're skipping Modern Movie Monday this week. Here's a review a did earlier in the month that's scheduled to appear this week on the blog.
20 Mule Team (1940)
Plot Summary
t is 1892 in Death Valley and the yields from the Borax ore are getting so small that refining it is a losing proposition. The only thing that will save the company is a new deposit of high grade Borax, and Bill Bragg (Wallace Beery) has a pouch of it that he got from a dead prospector that he buried on the road. Stag Roper (Douglas Fowley) knows the value of the strike could be worth millions, but he needs Bill to find the prospectors' claim so they can record it and become rich partners. While Roper has no intention of cutting Bill in on the millions, he also has his eye on young Jean (Anne Baxter). Josie (Jean's mother played by Marjorie Rambeau) sees Roper for the scalawag that his is and it means trouble in Furnace Flat.
That's a pretty good thumbnail sketch for a very good western starring Wallace Beery. By the 1940s as Beery was getting older he started to take more western roles and this is one of the better ones. The film is free of any little kids which usually shared top billing with Beery and instead we get a very well constructed if a bit melodramatic story. That's not to say that the movie takes itself seriously all the time because it doesn't. As with most of Beery's films there's a bit of everything from comedy to him being villainous. If you really want to get a good handle on Beery was like as an actor this is a good film as well as the original version of The Champ (1931) from nearly a decade earlier. Beery is accompanied by his partner Leo Carrillo who plays a very stereotypical Indian character. While the portrayal is a bit insulting I have to give credit where it's due because there are some very good moments between the two such as one scene where Beery is in murky water and he's trying to hydrate himself as they talk about what he'd like to accomplish in life and what the big city of Chicago would be like for the both of them as that's the place he's always wanted to live.
This has to be one of the very few movies that has anything to do with the transport and exploitation of borax and the machinations towards laying claim to the piece of land that has it. The movie could've easily stuck to formula and been a claim war type of western but it eschews that for a far more interesting story of Josie and Jean Johnson played by Rambeau and Baxter respectively. Rambeau has a TON of screentime here and is excellent. There's a world weariness to her and a bit of sorrow as she knows her daughter wants to see the world and make something of herself. She had promised for years to send her off for a proper education in LA but has never had the money to do so. To complicate things there's the relationship Jean has with Mitch (Noah Beery Jr. son of Noah Sr. and nephew of Wallace) which seemingly ends after they have a fight. Jean also wants to be with a man of the world who has money and can take care of her and show her things she's never seen or experienced before.
As I said Rambeau is excellent however it's mirrored by Anne Baxter's performance being rather poor. Ms. Baxter would go on to be a very good actress in her own right but this was her first film and her greenness shows as she's very stagy in her acting and at times it looks like she might be reading from a cue card as she delivers a line that should be spoken to her mother's face but she's looking off stage left. It didn't help that she and Berry Jr. had very country bumpkin type dialogue and dialect to speak their lines in so it makes it doubly bad. It isn't cringeworthy but her performance sticks out like a sore thumb in what is otherwise a pretty well acted film.
The villain of the piece Stag Roper is played to suave but slimy perfection by Douglas Fowley. These are the kind of villains I like in that they seem like great gentleman but deep down they're nothing but snakes. His scheming to use Bill in order to find the claim and swooping in to take in the virginal Jean makes him pretty easy to hate. Again, unlike most movies this one keeps the hero/villain dynamic to a minimum as the focus is clearly on the mother/daughter relationship and Bill's role in fixing things for Josie.
There are a TON of great scenes in this movie such as when Bill gets to town and tries to get a beer and get into his room at Josie's bar/hotel only to be hassled away because he's never paid off his tab. Even a cliched "severely wounded character" moment in which Bill finally realizes his inaction in helping Josie caused her to be hurt is played well because of the chemistry between the two actors.
Wallace Beery's westerns haven't garnered much critical acclaim historically but they're usually very good efforts and Beery makes for a well rounded larger than life western figure with a touch of world weariness and resignation of his lot in life that would be expanded and exploited by Randolph Scott a decade later during his collaborations with director Bud Boetticher. I give 20 Mule Team a solid ****
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