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| Philip Carey, Gary Cooper, and Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams |
André De Toth's Springfield Rifle is a very good and under sung Western released in 1952. It was a part of wave of films that featured weapons in their title, a trend heralded by the success of Winchester '73 in 1950. Titles included Colt .45, Carbine Williams, Kentucky Rifle, and many more on American television. The film, which had multiple writers attached to it, seems a little like a stitched together Frankenstein's monster. It is set during the Civil War and has Gary Cooper attached to a fort in Colorado where he and his cohorts must thwart Confederate rustlers who are stealing Yankee horses. The titular rifles are one of the stuck on bits. They are mentioned briefly at the beginning and arrive at the nick of time as a deus ex machina to save Coop and the Yanks. Springfield rifles had been made at the armory in Massachusetts since the Mexican War era, but a new innovation occurred during the 1860s. The Civil War marked the shift from muzzle loading rifles to the easier to use breech loading models which gave the more industrial North an edge.
Another negative aspect of this filmic kluge is the romance angle. Phyllis Thaxter travels all the way from West Chester, PA. to Coop's fort to beg him to turn his sword into a plowshare. The scenes are pointless, a repeat of Coop's equally tedious scenes with Grace Kelly in High Noon which had opened three months before Springfield Rifle. Hollywood always has been a place with many echo chambers. What is original about the film is that it is an espionage flick with Western trappings. There is a spy at Coop's fort who must be unmasked. Coop, we learn, must go under cover, even undergoing a trumped up court martial. Once he is cast out of the Yankee fort with the yellow stripe of cowardice on his back, he ingratiates himself with the rustlers and is able to unmask the traitor. Critics and audiences at the time bridled against the film as needlessly convoluted for a Western. However, this is what I like about the film. Cooper's character has only a limited number of people he can trust, the number of whom diminishes as the movie unspools. The air of the film is rife with paranoia. Most of the characters, Yank or Reb, seem nice enough, though we know there is a two faced traitor in their midst. Characters often hide their true motivations and De Toth treats them all equivocally. This is not a film of good guys and bad guys. Even the villain has his reasons.
I view Springfield Rifle as largely a Cold War allegory concocted in the shadow of the arrest and trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were arrested in the summer of 1950 and their trial began in March of 1951. They were executed in 1953. Springfield Rifle trumpets its theme: that counterespionage is necessary to the preservation of our Republic. A message that must have seemed pertinent in the age of the Red Menace. This theme seems most obviously to be the work of screenwriter Charles Marquis Warren. As the late Philip French has pointed out 🌵, Warren was on the hawkish Hollywood right wing and wrote and directed another 1952 Western, Hellgate, that can be seen as a pro-McCarthy statement. Despite the rigidity of Springfield Rifle's theme, Warren and De Toth sketch ambivalent characters with multiple dimensions. Cooper's character can bond with the Rebs as well as he can with his compatriots. It helps that such capable and familiar, to my generation, actors such as Martin Milner, Alan Hale Jr., and Fess Parker are on hand. De Toth handles his cast with aplomb. Even Lon Chaney Jr., a clumsy performer if you ask me, is effective as a craven killer. De Toth handles his exteriors as well as his actors with Mt. Whitney and its surrounding standing in for the Rockies. The snow draped hills provide an apt setting for treachery, as they do in De Toth's Day of the Outlaw.
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| Phylllis Thaxter's profile and Paul Kelly |
Spoiler Alert
Cooper is an axiomatic personality: if you've seen him once, you pretty much know what you are going to get. The performance that most impressed me was Paul Kelly's as the traitor. He provides a smooth and unruffled facade, but also hints at the inner turmoil of a man who is not what he seems. I'd enjoyed Kelly in a number of films, like The President Vanishes, The Roaring Twenties, Flying Tigers, Crossfire, and Side Street, but wonder why he had a career that seems partially submerged. He began onstage, but was featured in film as early as 1919 when he wooed Mary Miles Minter in Anne of Green Gables. In 1927 he beat to a pulp actor Ray Raymond, a brawl precipitated by Kelly's affair with actress Dorothy Mackaye. Raymond never regained consciousness and Kelly was convicted of manslaughter. Kelly was sentenced to serve ten years, but was sprung after 25 months. He eventually married Mackaye and they were wed until her death in 1940 from injuries resulting from a automobile accident.
🌵 Philip French, Westerns, Pgs. 81-82.
