How The West Was Won?-Kirk Douglas’ “Last Train From Gun Hill” (1959)-A Film Review

Nice double feature Saturday matinee poster, right?

DVD Review

By Sandy Salmon

Last Train from Gun Hill, starring Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, 1959 

I have often had occasion to mention that when I was growing up in the Acre section of North Adamsville in the 1950s the “golden age” of the Western, on the screen and on television that my fellow corner boys and I were sucked in by the myths surrounding the Old West like the good guy wore white and the bad guys black, the only good injun was a dead one, that rough justice came out of the barrel of a gun and lots of other stuff copied from the old dime store novels on which the shows were created from. Moreover many a Saturday afternoon double feature matinee at the old long gone Strand Theater were spent watching mostly in Technicolor those myths getting a workout on the screen (this before finding the virtues of film noir when the theater owner to save cash would do 1940s retrospectives and later when the theater was a “screen” for taking some sweet girl to the balcony for a little, well, you know a little. The film under review, Last Train From Gun Hill, gives plenty of ammunition to bolster those old blasé myths about the West, the taming of the West but with a little twist.      

The twist here is that unlike most early Westerns where the “only good injun is a dead injun” a Native American woman (we are after all in the 2000s and to use the film’s “squaw” is nothing if not demeaning) taking her son home from visit with her father has been raped and murdered by a couple of young drunk Anglo cowboys who did not have an ounce of political correctness or morality for that matter in their entire bodies. What they did have, or at least one of them had, was a rich cattle baron father, one tough hombre named Craig Belsen played by Anthony Quinn, to squelch any backlash against his errant son Rick who can do no wrong, no legal wrong anyway, in the old man’s eyes. Keeping son Rick from a well-deserved hangman’s noose is what drives this plotline. Why Craig gives a rat’s ass about this ne’er-do-well son is beyond reason, except he is the heir to that big spread and to the “ownership” of the town, the town of Gun Hill.        

Problem, big problem in the end. That Native American woman, that “squaw,” was wife of tough as nails lawman Matt Morgan, played by cleft-chinned Kirk Douglas, who did his taming of the West a few towns over. Craig and Matt are old compadres but that won’t keep Sonny Boy from a big step off, from a date with the hangman and a burial in some Boot Hill, if Matt has anything to do with the matter once he knows from a saddle initials hint who he was dealing with. If it was just a matter of grabbing the kid and heading back on the next train (the last train, a late one, and hence the title) to sweet justice (or a fatal “attempted” escape on the way back) our Matt is up against it. No help from the bought-off townspeople not even the law. Well almost no help except Belsen’s much abused and put upon mistress who helps even up the odds for the ever inventive Morgan.

That no help and that long wait for the train while the forces of evil are arrayed against him that round out the film. As to be expected the two protagonists have to go mano a mano with each other.  That is when 1950s Hollywood Western script return to form as the good guys beat the bad guys without a whimper. Still it was nice to see somebody stick up for the let’s face it historically much abused Native Americans who were there long before the wild and tamed West ever got their names.