1/27/09: Good Day for a Hanging (1959)
There are a lot of Leftist classic westerns. The best example remains the hateful
High Noon, which at least inspired
Rio Bravo as a response.
Good Day for a Hanging came out the same year (
Warlock, too), but it’s probably more of an afterthought. Still, the film is a surprisingly modern drama that proves not every screenwriter was trying to rewrite the HUAC hearings as a horse opera.
Fred MacMurray is Ben Cutler, a widower who lives with his daughter Laurie and is about to marry widow Ruth—who’s got a kid of her own. This introduction to his pleasant life is intercut with a bank robbery in the small Nebraska town of Springdale. The lookout is former local kid Eddie Campbell (played perfectly by Robert Vaughn). It’s not really a smart idea to get the former local boy watching out for the lawmen. Cutler’s daughter used to be quite close to Eddie, and he’s distracted when Laurie tells him how nice it is to see him again.
The heist ends in gunfire, with Cutler joining the old kindly sheriff in chasing down the bank robbers. Others join in, but most of the bank robbers get away. Eddie’s slowed down because he’s kind of trigger-happy. The young bandit manages to kill the sheriff before Cutler brings Eddie down with a bullet-graze to the skull.
Cutler brings Eddie back to town, gets the local doctor to look after him at the jail, and breaks the bad news to the sheriff’s wife. She accepts his death with grace in a touching scene. Meanwhile, Laurie is feeling sorry for poor Eddie.
Cutler leaves the jail after Dr. Ridgley has patched up Eddie’s minor wound. There’s a crowd outside. One man asks, “How soon will he be well enough to hang, Ben?”
“A judge and a jury will decide his punishment,” replies Cutler. “Not you.”
Cutler gets home, where Laurie’s still worried about Eddie. “He’s bad,” she explains, “but he didn’t kill anyone.” Cutler witnessed the murder, so he disagrees. Dr. Ridgely drops by—seeming reliably dull—to ask Laurie for her hand in marriage. Well, she just can’t commit to anything with Eddie in trouble. It first seems Ridgely bungles this rejection by musing over how he’ll soon be declaring Eddie dead. Laurie then acts so offended that the doctor seems like a pretty good guy.
The county commissioners stop by to ask Cutler to become the new sheriff. Cutler hasn’t been a lawman since Laurie was born, but he agrees, if only for a little while. He takes the oath right there on his Bible. He’s the only one who knows the right words.
Eddie’s busy tearing his stitches off in jail, proclaiming that he wants to die. Ridgely isn’t impressed. He knows it’s a minor wound, and that Eddie knows it, too. Laurie brings Eddie some food, which ends his short hunger strike. He assures Laurie that he’s being framed by her father, who’s upset that her former love has returned to town. She buys it. Cutler isn’t doing much better with Ruth. She’s feeling sorry for Eddie, too. Cutler reminds Ruth that it was a guy like Eddie who made her a widow. “Eddie is just a boy,” she responds. “Tom was killed by a hardened criminal.”
Back in town, an attorney named Selby has arrived to represent Eddie. Cutler tells Selby not to prejudice the local jury pool, but soon finds the lawyer buying drinks for everyone at the local bar. The topic of discussion is Eddie’s difficult childhood. We should mention that we’re not sure if Selby’s been hired by Eddie’s cohorts. The prosecuting attorney explains that Selby is also a politician who’s thinking of running for governor. A splashy murder case would serve him well.
There’s still some frontier justice, in the sense that it doesn’t take three years for Eddie to go on trial. It takes long enough, though. The crowd jeers Cutler and cheers Eddie as they head to the courthouse. It turns out that posses are inherently confusing. Cutler is the only one who’s willing to be an eyewitness to Eddie shooting the sheriff. That’s good enough to get Eddie found guilty.
Throughout the film, Robert Vaughn has been doing a James Dean impersonation. He lets loose with the tears as he addresses the court before sentencing. He insists that he didn’t kill anyone, that he doesn’t blame Cutler for being wrong, and then there’s a big finish: “I swore that I’d never beg for anything, but I’m begging now for my life, and for a second chance—because I never really had a first one.”
It’s a great performance for both actor and character. Eddie still gets sentenced to death by hanging.
This leads to something you don’t often see in films about the changing West. The prosecuting attorney—who’s drunk and riddled with guilt—explains to Cutler that he just can’t take Eddie out to a tree and put him on a barrel. Cutler knows he needs to build a proper gallows. The lawyer has the government standards, including the building of a fence to ensure privacy. A public execution is considered cruel and unusual punishment.
Back at the jail house, Eddie has confessed his love to Laurie. Now she’s going to do him a favor by smuggling a gun into his jail cell. She tries, but gets caught after Cutler insists that his deputies search the latest basket of food that she’s brought for Eddie. At least the gun isn’t loaded. Laurie still deserves to get slapped—especially after she tells her father, “Eddie’s not like you. He wouldn’t murder an innocent man.”
The county commissioners are getting together a petition to have Eddie’s sentence commuted to prison. Ruth is angry that the hanging is scheduled for what was supposed to be her wedding day. Her kid is the last person in town on Cutler’s side. He wants to grow up to be a lawman. Cutler tells him that might not be such a good idea.
On to the real SPOILER territory. Cutler takes the petition to the governor, who commutes Eddie’s sentence. The sheriff hands over the document to the county commissioners, along with his badge. Too bad that Eddie’s old cohorts have shown up to break him out of jail. (In a few years, of course, they’ll be the heroes in films like this.) Laurie gets dragged into the escape, so she finally learns that Eddie might have been faking his feelings for her.
The drunken deputies only get knocked out, but those idiots should’ve been shot. They were too busy palling around with Eddie to notice that trouble was brewing. The doctor had to go check things out, only to be beaten for his troubles. You can guess that Cutler ends up saving his daughter, with an assist from the good doctor. Ridgely also gets to win over Laurie with another smart remark.
It’s a happy ending all around, with one particularly nice moment. There’s one black guy in town, but we’ve only seen him when Cutler gets into a fight with Eddie’s attorney. He’s the only local who seems happy that Cutler wins the fight. Then he shows up at the end with a gun to kill one of Eddie’s cohorts. We don’t know who he’s supposed to be, but Cutler should hire him as a new deputy. Cutler certainly could, since the repentant townsfolk convince him to come back to work as the sheriff. Like we said, this isn’t
High Noon.
Make it your own: Available
on DVD, while lacking bonus features but looking great. Actually, we were surprised to see that. We thought the film was out of print. Then we realized we were thinking of another Fred MacMurray western that we’ll write about on Thursday. We’ll keep that entry shorter. This one sure rambled on for a while.
