Weird Westerns

The decade of the 1950s gave birth to some genuinely weird westerns. I honestly don’t know why that might have been. Was it because the 1950s was a rather weird time? Or because so many westerns had been made they were running out of ideas? In this post I’m going to highlight and make a few points about two of them.

The first is Rancho Notorious (1952), directed by Fritz Lang and starring Marlene Dietrich, Arthur Kennedy, and Mel Ferrer. What makes it weird?

It opens, as quite a number 50s westerns did, with a rather florid song being sung over the credits. “This is the tale of Chuck-a-Luck”. What’s “Chuck-a-Luck”? We don’t know. (I know it’s a gambling game.) The working title of the movie was The Legend of Chuck-a-Luck, “Chuck-a-Luck” being an outlaw hideout run by Marlene Dietrich. But Howard Hughes, head of RKO, objected to the title so it was changed to Rancho Notorious. How is “Rancho Notorious” worked into the script? It isn’t.

The characters in Rancho Notorious were rather weird as well. Marlene Dietrich had just turned 50. She still looked great but, well, she had just turned 50 and 70 years ago 50 was a lot older than it is now. And she was still playing, essentially, the same character she’d been playing since 1930. She should have graduated to more mature roles and reportedly Fritz Lang wanted that but Marlene refused. By the end of the shooting of the film they were barely speaking.

Others of the characters just feel vaguely “off”. Rancho Notorious could very nearly be moved to the Austrian Alps, exchanging Mexicans and Native Americans for Romanians and Roma people without otherwise changing it a great deal.

Rancho Notorious is a revenge story and, at the end, just about everybody except Arthur Kennedy is dead. He’s gotten his revenge.

Present day viewers (assuming there are present day viewers—it’s watchable but just barely) will find Rancho Notorious oddly familiar. Blazing Saddles is largely a parody of Rancho Notorious—the theme song, Lily Von Shtupp, some of the other characters.

Did you think that “gender bender” westerns with female gunfighters and male helpless victims were an invention of the 1990s? Hardly. Johnny Guitar (1954) got there 40 years earlier. Joan Crawford (yes, Joan Crawford who became a star playing flappers in the 20s and revived her career with Mildred Pierce 20 years later) plays a gun-slinging female saloonkeeper, Sterling Hayden a sort of male bimbo. He’s not as helpless as he seems!

I can’t bring myself to rewatch Johnny Guitar which is a shame because it features the fabulous radio actress Mercedes McCambridge who, it is said, received standing ovations for her more dramatic scenes from the crew.

I presume there is some Nicholas Ray fan out there who will disagree with me about Johnny Guitar. Without a difference of opinion there would be no horseraces.

Any other weird westerns from the 1950s? Or later? I wouldn’t count parodies like Blazing Saddles and the great Lust in the Dust. Billy the Kid vs. Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, both made in 1966, come to mind.