WELLS FARGO (1937)

Hollywood history typically typecasts Paramount Pictures as Home of the Continental Sophisticates (and they were!; think Lubitsch, Wilder, Sturges).  Yet the studio first found footing with C.B. DeMille’s 1914 Western THE SQUAW MAN.  (You could also make a case for that production founding Hollywood itself.)  And Paramount had their biggest hit of the silent era inventing the epic Western: James Cruze’s THE COVERED WAGON/’23.  Later, when Westerns fell out of favor in the ‘30s, those same books give John Ford credit for reviving the genre as a first-class item in STAGE COACH/’39, conveniently ignoring DeMille’s bigger budget/larger grossing Western of the same year, UNION PACIFIC.  While two years before those films, double-Oscar’d producer/director Frank Lloyd made this large-scale Western to follow hard on DeMille’s blockbuster THE PLAINSMAN/’36.  Starring Hollywood’s happiest/handsomest married couple, Joel McCrea & Francis Dee, it’s one of those Great Man bio-pics, here about a Wells Fargo agent/advance man thru enough decades for both to turn gray as the finance company grows with the country in the 1800s and Dee sacrifices marital happiness to Manifest Destiny.  A little bit of everything in this one: stick-ups; family hardship; Gold Rush; Native Americans (helpful and ‘un’); Civil War conspiracies; whew!  All in 98 minutes with quality casting up & down the line, plus a few rising contract players.  Lloyd was a solid, but pretty stiff helmer by 1937, a quality that undercut next year’s IF I WERE KING, but works perfectly for this square-built vehicle.  Exceptionally well shot by Theodor Sparkuhl (check out some of his dark interiors) and scored by Victor Young, it remains good value Hollywood hokum.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Links to the Paramount Westerns mentioned above.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-covered-wagon-1923.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-plainsman-1936.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/union-pacific-1939.html  

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Note how young & sexy McCrea still looks.  Sparkuhl delivering ravishing close-ups that give Dee a run for her money.  Yet just two years on, in UNION PACIFIC, DeMille had McCrea hitch up his pants (now hanging above rather than below his navel) and lost half the natural sex appeal.