A nice 95-minute advertisement for a company still with us, 1941’s Western Union is appropriately both a western and about the Union, being an adaptation of a Zane Grey story about how the west was won, or at least connected up to the rest of the United States, by telegraph wire. In linking coast to coast, telegraph company Western Union helped forge the country into a more solid political entity.
Three men dominate the action – Randolph Scott as Vance Shaw, a loner former outlaw and fixer persuaded to join the drive to lay cable across terrain good and bad. Robert Young plays rich man’s son Richard Blake, an engineer who is also Shaw’s rival for the hand of Sue Creighton (Virginia Gilmore), pretty and also savvy sister of the third leg of the male stool, Edward Creighton, a Western Union nabob, played by Dean Jagger.
As well as rough terrain and rougher men on the work crews, there are two obstacles to the work being completed. The warlike tribes who still control chunks of the territory the wire will have to cross. And the Civil War, raging further south but whose political effects can be felt rippling across the West.
This is a western full of manly men and heroic deeds, introduced with a western hoedown theme by composer David Buttolph, who shifts into wampum powwow cliche for the Indians, generally portrayed as either drunk or stupid or gullible. Though the real villains of the piece are a group of Confederacy renegades, headed by Barton MacLane’s gnarly Jack Slade, opportunists on the make by any means necessary. So though it’s pretty unreconstructed as westerns go, the seeds of the later revisionist western can be found here, with Scott’s Vance Shaw as the bridge between older and newer iterations.
He’s the rough to Blake’s smooth, the western university-of-life toughie to Blake’s eastern college-boy softie. Much is made of these juxtapositions throughout. Which man is Sue going to choose – stonefaced Vance or grinning Richard?
It’s big Hollywood entertainment with something for most tastes – drama, lots of action, romance, lively music, lush Technicolor looks and incidental comedy courtesy of its side characters, like cowardly cook Herman (Slim Summerville) and ghoulish Doc Murdoch (John Carradine). Director Fritz Lang tells his story through pictures rather than words, initially at any rate, with big, obvious almost silent-movie-style introductions to faces and places.
It’s not top-flight Lang, and though it’s a very charming movie, it’s not much use as historical record – the Native American Indians were in favour of “the wire”, apparently – and its representation of the men in warpaint and feathers is likely to lose a few potential admirers.
Having proved himself with The Return of Frank James, his first western, Lang has clearly decided he’s paid his dues to the genre and leans back into journeyman mode. That said, he wakes up a bit in the action sequences – there’s a forest fire that’s particularly well done, plus a big gunfight finish that Lang makes fresh and new. As with The Return of Frank James, Lang likes to linger on the sinuous movement of horses more than most directors. Possibly his European outsider’s eye saw an everyday beauty in them that his American brothers in directing had got used to.
Young is top billed but Scott is clearly the star. His character, Vance Shaw, is the one with the knot of a problem to solve. His divided loyalties are flagged up in the scene that introduces him to the audience and he’s still wrestling with them as the end credits are about to roll. As adverts go, it’s got depth.
Western Union – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
