Brandon de Wilde & Paul Newman in

Hud (1963) - dir. Martin Ritt

Brandon DeWilde

Those Calloways: in this underappreciated Walt Disney classic, an eccentric family living out in the backwoods of Vermont work towards building their own sanctuary for migrating geese. Bucky Calloway does his best to make his father's dream a reality!

John Davis Chandler (& Tom Skerritt) Those Calloways Dir: Norman Tokar

Night Passage(1957)

Martin Ritt’s “Hud” May 29, 1963.

Brandon De Wilde, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, and Alan Ladd in Shane (George Stevens, 1953)

Cast: Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, Brandon De Wilde, Jack Palance, Ben Johnson, Edgar Buchanan, Emile Meyer, Elisha Cook Jr. Screenplay: A.B. Guthrie Jr., based on a novel by Jack Schafer. Cinematography: Loyal Griggs. Art direction: Hal Pereira, Walter H. Tyler. Film editing: William Hornbeck, Tom McAdoo. Music: Victor Young. 

The sexual tension between Shane (Alan Ladd) and Marian Starrett (Jean Arthur) is key to the texture and motivation of George Stevens's Shane. It's obvious from the moment when she watches him, shirtless and glistening with sweat, help her rather dull (and fully clad) husband, Joe (Van Helflin), uproot a tree stump, and it plays like a low bass note throughout the film, until it becomes the main reason why Shane feels he has to move on at the end. After all, he has just humiliated Joe by knocking him unconscious and taking on the role Joe assumes is his rightful one, thereby reducing him in the eyes of his wife and son, Joey (Brandon De Wilde). It also doesn't escape the notice of the bad guys, one of whom taunts Shane with the fact that Joe has a pretty wife. (The filters used on some of Arthur's closeups are a giveaway: She was 50 when she made Shane, her last film, but she's plausible as a character 10 or 15 years younger.) It's to Stevens's credit that he plays all of this as low-key as he does. It would have been much too easy to move the eternal triangle to the center of the film's structure. Shane is an intelligent film, though to my mind it gets a little heavy-handed with the introduction of the black-hatted Wilson (Jack Palance) as the potential nemesis to the knight errant Shane. As fine as Palance's performance is, I wish his character had been given a more complex backstory than just "hired gun out of Cheyenne." Otherwise, the screenplay by A.B. Guthrie Jr. does a fair job of not making its villains too deep-dyed: The chief tormenter of the sodbusters, the cattleman Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer), is given a speech justifying himself as having gotten there first and settled the land -- we haven't yet reached the point in historical consciousness where the claims of the Native Americans are taken seriously. And Shane's first opponent, Chris Calloway (Ben Johnson), eventually has a change of heart -- not an entirely convincing one to my mind, considering Calloway's behavior in his first encounter with Shane -- and warns Shane that Joe's appointment with Ryker is a trap. Stevens uses Jackson Hole, Wyoming, almost as effectively as John Ford used Monument Valley, and Loyal Griggs won a well-deserved Oscar for his cinematography, even if Paramount's decision to trim the original images at top and bottom to make the film appear to have been shot in a widescreen process resulted in some oddly cropped compositions. Shane is undeniably a classic, but I think it takes itself a little too seriously: The great Western directors, like Ford and Howard Hawks, knew the value of a little comic relief, but in Shane even Edgar Buchanan plays it straight.

Bad movie I have In Harm's Way 1965

Eva Marie Saint-Brandon De Wilde "Su propio infierno" (All fall down) 1962, de John Frankenheimer.

Brandon de Wilde in

Those Calloways (1964)

HUD / 1963 film

Paul Newman & Brandon deWilde

♈ April 9th: Silver Screen Star, Brandon deWilde.

Night Passage, 1957