Warlock

David Bordwell in his recent book Reinventing Hollywood, How 1940s Filmmakers changed Movie Storytelling argues that, between 1940 and 1955, Hollywood screenwriters and producers complicated their films by introducing intricate flashfoward and flashback structures (with some flashbacks misleading or, even, flat-out untrue), employed multiple points of view, unreliable narrators, and orchestrated movies comprised of several different and incongruent subplots, all with a view toward making cinema more "adult" and intellectually demanding.  Edward Dmytryk's 1959 Warlock, although it falls outside the period of time considered by Bordwell in his book, exemplifies this tendency toward ever-increasing and baroque complexity.  Warlock is a Western, a genre not notable for its subtlety but the film is insanely complex, full of bizarre psychological conflicts, and murky motivation played out against a narrative framework that seemingly requires every single male character to shoot it out with every other man in the movie. (Since the film has homosexual overtones, the burden of masculinity seems to be having to shoot the other guy to avoid fucking him.) The result is confusing, although like many films noir, the picture is  reasonably lucid on a shot-by-shot basis -- the problem is figuring out, in the end, how the picture progressed from its start to its ending since the the labyrinthine plot is close to impenetrable.

Warlock is Western town of the standard movie variety somehow plopped down in the middle of a vast and barren wasteland of canyons and deserts.  The town seems to have a smelter since we see a little plume of smoke when cowboys crest a hill and see the village posed surrealistically amid an enormous and lethal-looking desert.  (The village which has a Norman Rockwell aspect is just painted into a vista of the canyonlands.)  Like many Western towns of this sort, the economy of the place is never established -- exactly why there would be a town out in this  howling desolation is never explained.  (It's a bit like the town in Westworld although that place has the raison d'etre of imitating villages in old movies like this one).  The only explanation for the place's existence is that the village is a source of rest and relaxation for a group of vicious cowhands who work for an equally vicious rancher on a spread called San Pablo.  The San Pablo ranch is wholly male, with no women-folk around, and this gives the gang of thuggish cowboys an weirdly asexual or, even, homosexual tint.  The cowhands periodically descend upon San Pablo and shoot the place to pieces as shown in an introductory sequence in which a hapless Italian emigrant barber (he's like one of the Mario Bros.) is gunned down and the acting sheriff expelled from town.  The City Fathers, including a beautiful young woman named Miss Jessie, the film's virgin, hire a gunman to act as sheriff and "regulate" the town.  A deputy gets $40 a month; the hired gun is paid $400 for the same time period and says that this is scarcely enough to provide for the ammunition he uses for his incessant fast-gun target practice.  The hired gun is named Blazedale and he is played by Henry Fonda as a more ambiguous version of the sheriff that he acted in Ford's My Darling Clementine -- in one scene, he even leans back in a chair replicating the gesture that characterized the lawman in the Ford film.  This being an "adult" Western, Fonda's Blazedale is given some vestigial psychology and comes equipped with weird sidekick, Morgan, the Black Rattlesnake (played fiercely enough by Anthony Quinn).  Morgan seems modeled on Doc Holiday and he's locked in a homo-erotic love affair with Blazedale -- the  two have been living together for decades and they are, by far, the most compelling romantic couple in the film.  Indeed, when Blazedale falls for the town virgin and begins to court her, poor Morgan melts down and goes berserk, shooting at everyone in town.  This, in turn, drives Blazedale into a frenzy and, after the manner of William S. Hart in Hell's Hinges, he burns down half the town that he is sworn to defend.  Blazedale and Morgan are dudes and they wear resplendent vests with satin backs; Morgan even reads from a book ostentatiously and speaks like Cicero.  The gowns of the two female leads are even more spectacularly beautiful.  Blazedale and Morgan's modus operandi is to set up a saloon themselves, sell booze, and deal Faro (this is Morgan's specialty), thereby, supplementing Blazedale's income as sheriff.  (This is fine with the town's citizenry.)  Morgan, who walks with a bad limp (perhaps, he's a victim of childhood polio something much on the minds of movie audiences in 1959) seems to have had an illustrious career as a pimp, promoting showgirls and prostitutes in their saloon.  One of Morgan's ex-prostitutes, Lily, played by the pouting Dorothy Malone, comes to town with a man who is supposed to kill someone as an act of revenge for the death of her boyfriend, the gunman's brother, some time before.  Morgan, who's relationship to Lily is extremely odd, guns down the avenger when her stagecoach is robbed by members of the San Pablo gang -- thus, pinning the murder on the vicious cowboys from the ranch.  Lily promptly falls for Johnny Gannon, one of the mob of evil cowboys, who is torn by pangs of conscience and leaves the San Pablo gang to become a deputy sheriff working with Blazedale.  Everyone in the movie has an elaborate back-story -- Lily is a whore trying to go straight (who has lost her lover and desires revenge), Johnny Gannon (Richard Widmark) is a post-Korean war vet with PTSD, although the movie is set in 1881 -- he participated in a massacre of Mexicans in a canyon ambush contrived by the San Pablo gang and can't shake his sense of guilt over those killings.  Morgan, renowned as a deadly murderer, is tormented by memories of being taunted and despised for being a cripple.  All of this works itself out through a series of stylized gunfights on the main street of unfortunate Warlock.  After mangling Johnny's hand, the leader of the San Pablo gang attacks the town and his mob gets killed off -- this is where the viewer expects the film to end.  But, then, Johnny Gannon has to fight Blazedale and Blazedale has to fight his best friend (and possible lover) Morgan and so on and on.  Everyone talks in a high-flown literary kind of way, reflecting, perhaps, the fact that the movie is adapted from a well-regarded novel by Oakley Ames (recently reissued by the New York Review of Books press).  The film is shot in overlit cinemascope technicolor -- interiors are all sparkling clean and gleam like high efficiency late-fifties kitchens.  The landscapes, apparently filmed in Southeastern Utah are gorgeous, vast red canyons and towering mesas but almost all of the action takes place on the dusty main street of Warlock, a highly conventional setting.  Dymytryk tries to make things visually interesting -- in the opening sequence, a watering truck is spraying dust on the High Noon-style main street; this results in a two-tone lane, half wet and dark red and the other dusty red for a preliminary shoot-out. (The water-truck also gets perforated in a predictable way.) In a later scene, that could be extracted from Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, the vengeful Blazedale stands as a pale figure of retribution in the charred ruins of his own saloon, a place that he has burned in a fit of irrational pique arising from his lover's quarrel with Morgan.  Toward the end of the movie, everyone is acting from motives that are "deep" in the shallow way of psychoanalytically motivated fifties' films with the result that the action is confusing and seems unrealistically contrived.  The gun battles are reasonably well choreographed, although they make little sense from a practical standpoint -- typically, it's one man against about twenty; why would anyone accept these odds.  Everyone is obsessed with something called "backshooting" -- that is, getting an opponent to face-off with you for a gun duel and, then, having an accomplice shoot the foe in the back.  This is so obsessively adumbrated that one gets the distinct feeling that something else is at stake here -- probably homosexual buggery which may underlie some of the conflicts in this very conflict-ridden movie.  It's all acted well and DeForest Kelley (later famous for Star Trek) has an amusing role as yet another emotionally confused cowboy who switches sides and joins the good guys by the end of the movie.  The film is okay, I guess, but its too complicated and, after a while, you give up on trying to construe the picture so that it makes sense.