The Halliday Brand

Bill Williams and Ward Bond

Joseph H. Lewis' The Halliday Brand, from 1957, is a very good B Western that tackles racism. That very American bugaboo is personified by Sheriff Dan Halliday (Ward Bond), not only the law of the county, but a successful rancher and cattle baron. This prideful and stubborn patriarch has two sons, the more conformist and aptly named Clay (Bill Anderson) and a more independent namesake (Joseph Cotten). He also has a daughter, Martha (Betsy Blair), who earns his wrath by falling for a half breed ranch hand, Jivaro Burris (Christopher Dark). An incidence of rustling gives Sheriff Halliday a pretext with which to arrest Jivaro. The Sheriff forms a posse to chase the rustlers and leaves the jail virtually unguarded, knowing that the sure to come lynching will eliminate the ranch hand. .

Violence spirals out of control and the Sheriff guns down Jivaro's white father (Jay C. Flippen) in a showdown. Dan Jr. has fallen in love with Jivaro's sister, Aleta (Viveca Lindfors), and vows to topple his father from his position of power. He begins a campaign of petty terrors such as barn burnings and cattle stampedes. The concerned citizens of the town, peeved at suffering from the results of a family quarrel, drop their support of Sheriff Halliday. All of this is told in flashback. We first meet Dan Jr as he is being summoned home by Clay some months later. Pa is on his deathbed and we are subsequently filled in on the events that lay behind this familial estrangement. We expect Pa to be penitent as he awaits facing his Maker, but The Halliday Brand is made of sterner stuff.

The film is one of many Hollywood films, mostly Westerns, that readdresses miscegenation after the Second World War. What had previously been viewed as abhorrent, most famously in The Birth of a Nation and Gone With The Wind, was accepted in a new spirit of tolerance that reflected the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. There were exceptions, particularly Charles Marquis Warren's pungent Hellgate, but most films of this era (Pinky, The Searchers, The Indian Fighter, The Unforgiven, Giant, etc.) preached racial tolerance and offered a tentative endorsement of miscegenation. One of the weaknesses of The Holliday Brand is that its theme is trumpeted with overly rhetorical flourishes that stick out.

Fortunately, one of Hollywood's deftest and most underrated character actors gets to embody racism in a way that transcends the high falutin' speeches. As Ward Bond galumphs around the ranch house set expertly designed by David S. Garber, he displays not a trace of grace, but a sense of ownership and entitlement. This is a characterization very far from the stoic heroism (Fort Apache) or comic bluster (The Searchers) Bond displays in the films of John Ford. It is a portrait of ignorant intransigence. Bond is working without the method, but with a single mindedness that embodies a character out of whole cloth. This should be the goal of any actor, not to act but to be.

Bond has more lines than Joseph Cotten and this is just as well. Cotten was born two years after Bond, so he cannot convincingly play his son. Despite appearing in lots of Westerns from Duel in the Sun to Heaven's Gate, I never find him convincing as a sodbuster or gun slinger. He should have always been a Doc in Westerns, if anything. It is painful to watch Cotten pitching woo to Viveca Lindfors, he is too old for these shenanigans, but the Swedish born Lindfors is even more egregiously miscast as a half breed. Betsy Blair gets to break out of the good girl mold she was stuck with and spews her character's vitriol with relish. 

The main reason to watch The Halliday Brand, besides Ward Bond, is Lewis' direction. He manages to find memorable moments out of threadbare material. Some camera set-ups in The Halliday Brand betray the haste of the production and the desire to shoot efficiently and fast. However there are numerous compelling sequences that display this B master's deft touch: the casual insertion of an impatient undertaker looking at his watch during a funeral, the showdown between Bond and Flippen, the lynching. Despite its bare bones production values, The Halliday Brand is a wonderment. 77 minutes of cinema without a trace of fat.