The first odd element in Destry Rides Again is the picture's baffling setting. Somewhere in the West, there is a town called Bottleneck (a term that is literal in that we see desperadoes shooting to pieces whiskey bottles in the first scene but, also, figurative in that the plot has to be run through the constricting structure of a genre, the Western, to which it isn't exactly suited.) I have said that this is an "urban" Western -- the narrative revolves around an enormous saloon and gambling hall, a place consisting of two towering rooms rimmed by elevated walkways. In one of the huge rooms, always filmed swarming with people, there is a stage on which Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich), the goddess fiercely presiding over this place, can sing and dance; on the opposite side of the room, there is a huge bar. As is always the case in these places (cf. the gambling hall and saloon that Humphrey Bogart operates in Casablanca), management is ensconced in a suite of rooms up a long flight of steps above the hurly-burly of the casino and dance-hall floor -- so as to be able to better survey the action below. What is particularly curious about the terrain of this vast saloon is the fact that there are two huge rooms, separated by a partition -- I have no idea why this is the case, but it signals an important thing about the movie: Destry is characterized by a weird sense of the excessive; there's too much on-screen, too many extras, too many cowboys, too many subplots for that matter. The film insists upon its own excess: the saloon set is introduced via two bravura tracking shots -- in one, at ground level, Frenchy tours the set, encounters various minor figures with whom she interacts (most of them try to embrace her and she knocks them down) -- the camera tracks with her and shows us the "lay of the land." The other extraordinary tracking shot is aerial -- the camera glides along one of the upstairs balcony walkways and shows ud the two rooms full of revelers and the odd partition between them -- surely one huge saloon room would be enough. Why are there two? It's as if someone told the filmmaker to build an enormous set and make sure to get all the expense on-screen. (The place resembles The Chuck-a-Luck saloon in Fritz Lang's 1952 equally bizarre urban Western, also featuring Dietrich, Rancho Notorious.) Except for a few inserted shots, there's no Western scenery. I counted only two shots of men riding horses through open terrain. The saloon in this movie is a weird imaginary palace, plopped down in the middle of a town that seems to have no economy other than the huge dance-hall.
The plot and design of the film is equally strange. James Stewart, the film's hero, doesn't appear until about fifteen minutes has lapsed setting up the situation. He comes into town on a stagecoach with a blowhard tough-guy (his contribution to the plot makes no sense at all) and the tough-guy's comely sister. When a rough patch on the roadway bounces Stewart (Destry) onto the young woman's lap, the film signals a "meet cute" and that there will be a romance between the girl and the hero. But the film sketches this romance so briefly that if you blink you will miss it -- the movie is going to fish in deeper stranger waters. In the first fifteen minutes of the film, we're introduced to the saloon and its owner, the aptly named Rank, a sinister gambler who cheats at cards. Rank's squeeze is Frenchy, a courtesan from New Orleans who comes complete with a sassy Black maid. The action is driven by a bad act committed by Frenchy and shown at the start of the film. After leading a rousing song-and-dance number Frenchy goes upstairs to the card room where Rank is pretending to lose to a sucker, Claggart. (The name is odd -- Claggart, of course, is the villain in Melville's Billy Budd). Claggart is dumb enough to bet his whole ranch on the outcome of the game. Frenchy spills coffee on Claggart and in the ensuing confusion, switches cards on him so that he loses the game and everything he owns. When Claggart complains to the sheriff, the law man confronts Rank and is murdered off-screen (we hear two shots). The fact that the film contains a murder and later a macabre hunt for the dead man's corpse are elements in the picture that are hard to reconcile with its "comedy Western" genre elements. After the death of the sheriff, the crooked Mayor and Rank appoint the town drunk as the new sheriff. But the drunk (he's nicknamed Wash) miraculously gives up booze and recruits the son of a famous gunfighter to be his deputy. For some reason, Destry agrees to serve in that role -- hence, the scene on the stagecoach.
Destry is a pacifist -- his gunfighter father was shot down in an ambush and he thinks gun-play is idiotic and immoral. He doesn't wear guns and intends to tame the town without shooting anyone. He's also law-abiding, and quite willing to enforce the gambling debts that Rank holds on people in town, including the debt collateralized by the Claggart ranch. When Rank and a posse of his gangsters tries to seize the ranch, there's a gun-battle and Destry rides out to the "rescue" only to tell Claggart that he has to surrender the premises. (This is exceedingly peculiar). Destry's plan is to solve the murder of Sheriff Kehoe by finding the corpse and, then, making arrests of the perpetrators, chiefly Rank. In this way, he thinks he can get the ranch back to Claggart. At this point, the plot becomes strangely intricate. The tough-guy on the stagecoach has 10,000 head of cattle (where did he get them?) and wants to drive them across the valley (why?). Rank is collecting a toll of a quarter-dollar per head of cattle to cross the valley -- with Claggart's farm in his possession, he now owns the whole place. The tough-guy cowboy pistol-whips one of Rank's gangsters and shoots dead another. Destry is obliged to arrest him. (But, for some reason, the cowboy who happens to be flush with money pays Rank 2500 dollars to allow his cattle to pass.) By this time, Destry and Wash have found the dead sheriff's corpse and they arrest one of Rank's mobsters and put him in jail next to the tough-guy cowboy. Destry has accomplished all of this without any gun-play, something that astonishes Wash. Somehow or another, Rank's gunmen go to the jail and shoot down Wash -- he dies in Destry's arms. This sets up the remarkable climax. When Wash dies, Destry straps on his guns and leads an attack on the saloon in which Rank and his army are holed-up. The attack includes dynamite thrown through the front window of the saloon and, then, a huge assault in which wagons are used as fortifications to attack the dance-hall. The local good women (as is the case in most studio Westerns, females are divided into housewives/mothers opposed to saloon girls/prostitutes) take up hoes and rakes and march down the middle of the street. They boldly parade between the two groups of men shooting at each other and, then, attack the saloon. (It's a version of the Sabine women but immensely more elaborate that David's famous painting and the raison d'etre for the film.) The gunmen in the saloon are unwilling to shoot the women although they are armed with clubs. There's a huge battle in which the saloon is wrecked. Frenchy, who has fallen in love with Destry, suffers the fate of all bad girls with hearts of gold in Western films -- just before Destry shoots him, Rank fires his gun aimed at the hero but misses and kills Frenchy. In the last shot, peace is (sort of) restored in town and Destry seems to be romantically connected with the tough-guy cowboy's sister, one of the women who organized the assault on the Bar. But this is so minimally suggested that the romance is basically invisible -- the real romantic magnetism is, of course, between Destry and Frenchy: he has told her that if she scraped off most of her mask-like make-up, she would be a pretty woman. We see her wiping off her lipstick as she gazes into a mirror after he has told her this and, later, as she dies, Frenchy again makes the gesture of wiping the rouge off her cheeks. After showing a fearsome mob of women attacking the saloon, the movie makes a comical gesture toward restoring male dominance over the female sex. A Russian cossack named Stavrogin is married to one of the woman-warriors, Lulu Belle. Stavrogin literally loses his trousers in a card game at the saloon -- an event clearly figurative for the sexual influence of Frenchy and her dance-hall hostesses. There is an huge knock-down drag-out cat fight between Lulu Belle and Frenchy over the affair of the pants. This is also symbolic because Stavrogin "doesn't wear the pants" in the family -- Lulu Belle calls him "Callahan" after her beloved first husband who has died and whose picture she displays prominently in their home. At the end of the film, Stavrogin smashes up the picture of the dear departed Callahan, asserts his rights as a husband, and demands that Lulu Belle call him by his proper name. Thus, the film ends by back-pedaling away from its radical images of female empowerment -- images that were unexpected and, even, somewhat astonishing in a picture of this sort. (The Stavrogin-Callahan subplot, featuring Mischa Autry is like something that has wandered into the picture from a Lubitsch film. In fact, many scene in the film feature fast-talking dialogue that is similar to what one would expect in a "screwball comedy.")
The film's extravagance is noteworthy. Everything is bigger, louder, longer than we expect. The catfight between Lulu Bell goes on and on and on and results in the destruction of much furniture and the two women half-naked, bruised, and soaking wet (Destry has poured a jug of water on them to separate the combatants.) In the next sequence, Frenchy assaults Destry aiming a gun at him and, then, throwing bottles and crockery in his direction -- not just a few bottles and ceramics but dozens and dozens. The image that seems to have inspired the film makers is the army of women intervening in the gunfight and, then, attacking the saloon. Some of the shots in that battle are genuinely disturbing -- we see, for instance, the women backing minor villains up against the bar, beating them over the head into unconsciousness and, then, hauling their limp bodies up over the bar-rail to be hurled into the crowd of women, like enraged maenads tearing everything apart. The savagery of the women's attack on the saloon is shocking. It's fortunate that Frenchy is shot to death -- otherwise, it seems that the mob of enraged women would have torn her to pieces.
The plot doesn't really work. The subplot involving the tough-guy and his herd of 10,000 cattle that have miraculously materialized makes no sense and goes nowhere. (I think the subplot is designed as a motivation for the tough cowboy's sister to join with Lulu Belle and form the monstrous regiment of women that destroy the bar, but this isn't clearly depicted.) Destry's willingness to use the law to enforce Claggart's gambling debt to Rank is strange and not really resolved in the film -- we don't ever see Claggart back at his ranch. Destry's pacifism, mirroring the sentiment of much of the country in 1939, turns out not to be real -- in the end, he straps on his guns and leads an attack on the saloon that is shockingly violent. (American pacifism with respect to World War II also turned out to be fictional.) The cynical lovelorn Frenchy dying in Destry's arms is the famous image that one takes away from this film, but their romance never really blossoms -- it remains a matter of glances and half-heard suggestions (Destry talks in a very soft voice for most of the picture.) If Destry were really in love with Frenchy, the film's ending would be tragic and this won't work in a film advertised as a rock-em sock-em comedy Western. The subject matter in the film is generally too dire for its own good and the implications of much of what we see have to be either ignored or avoided -- hence, the distractions of the intricate plot in the film's last half-hour. Despite its utterly bizarre narrative and thematic features, the picture is a beautifully made example of studio classicism -- the movie withholds close-ups until its last scenes and, therefore, when the camera records Stewart or Dietrich in close shots, they have enormous impact. The film restored Dietrich to fame and establishes Stewart as a competent, attractive Western hero. And it contains Dietrich's signature number, See What the Boys in the Back Room will have, delivered in a throaty contralto as she prances back and forth across the stage in a cowboy hat and equestrian vest and trousers that are all tassels and glittering sequins scintillating in the luscious black and white. The effect is that of a Berlin cabaret somehow transported to the wilds of Nevada.
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