Nevada Smith

Nevada Smith
1966

nevada-smith-md-web

Produced and Directed by Henry Hathaway
Screen story and screenplay by John Michael Hayes
Based on the character in “The Carpetbaggers” by Harold Robbins
Music by Alfred Newman

CAST:

Steve McQueen – Max Sand, aka Nevada Smith
Karl Malden – Tom Fitch
Brian Keith- Jonas Cord
Arthur Kennedy – Bill Bowdre
Suzanne Pleshette – Pilar
Raf Vallone – Father Zaccardi
Janet Margolin – Neesa
Pat Hingle- Big Foot
Howard da Silva- Warden
Martin Landau – Jesse Coe
Paul Fix – Sheriff Bonnel
Gene Evans – Sam Sand
Josephine Hutcheson – Mrs Elvira McCanies|
Val Avery – Buck Mason

The 60s Retrospective series

Release dates: May / June 1966 in the USA, 29 July 1966 in the UK.

Recent reviews have centred on British film and Swinging Sixties. I’ve been reluctant to enter the Westerns genre because there are so many of them to do and the only 50s / 60s divide seems to be killing very slightly fewer Native-Americans in the 60s than the 50s. Not that the mid-60s was a peak era. In Nevada Smith the sympathetic characters are from the Kiowa tribe, or Cajun (Pilar) or Hispanic (the priest). That made it somewhat different. I also like Cat Ballou and Support Your Local Sheriff which turned the genre upside down.

carpetbaggers

See also my review of The Carpetbaggers.

Nevada Smith took my interest (£1 in a charity shop before lockdown, next to Custer of The West which I also bought) because I remembered the character. Everyone calls it a “prequel” to The Carpetbaggers. It may be a prequel to the 1964 film, but it’s not really a prequel to the 1961 novel. In the novel, Nevada Smith is a Hollywood cowboy actor in the 1920s. The novel is divided into nine”books” and The Story of Nevada Smith is Book Two and covers fifty pages of tiny text. It’s a flashback, rather than a prequel.

I was amazed that I had remembered Nevada Smith from the novel. My copy has ‘September 1965’ in my writing inside. I re-read it and The Dream Merchants in 1970, while doing my thesis on Hollywood and The Novel, but that’s still fifty years ago. Not only did I remember it, but I instantly spotted two examples of Bowdlerization in the film.

It’s the basic template ‘Kill the bad guys one by one, because they killed / raped / tortured / insulted … my wife / girlfriend / mom / dad / brother / sister / best pal / pet dog … story.

Nevada Smith is the name adopted by Max Sand. He had a Kiowa Native-American mother and a white father. Three bad guys turn up and kill his parents because they believe his dad, Sam, has buried gold. The Carpetbaggers is strong on the treatment of Native-Americans, far stronger than the film. In the book, they skin his mother alive and gang rape her. In the film they ‘cut her right up the middle’ and it’s reported apart from the first knife cut on her back. When Max arrives, she is ‘a shapeless mass.’ They probably report enough to make us feel his need to kill them all. In both, he sets fire to the house.

Later, one has a tobacco pouch made from Max’s mother’s breast, a shocking image that stuck. In the film, it is made from his mother’s dress. In the book Dort describes it as an ‘injun-tit’ and ‘squaw tit’ pouch.

The other Bowdlerization is the killing of the first baddie. In the book, I recall Nevada shoots him in the testicles and leaves him to contemplate this loss before finishing him off (much as I would have done in the circumstances). In the book it’s just a knife fight. Watching it, I wondered about the casting of Steve McQueen, who does not look remotely Native-American. I dug the book out. The reason the baddies fail to recognize Steve as a “half-breed” is his blue eyes. OK, justified.

Its skin was white and the eyes were blue like the father’s, but the hair was black and heavy on its little head.
The Carpetbaggers

I suppose dyeing McQueen’s hair might have helped. McQueen was also thirty-five, playing sixteen at the start.

The original idea of a Nevada Smith spinoff was mooted as The Carpetbaggers movie was being made in 1964. Alan Ladd, who played Smith, died shortly after making the film. He was only fifty-three, but surely couldn’t have played a sixteen year old if he had lived.

In the book, Max was born in 1882. (Let us not note that the Kiowa suffered an enforced migration to Oklahoma in 1867). That places the film story as starting in 1898 and spanning the turn of the century. The Carpetbaggers needed the story that late to allow for him being a film cowboy in 1925. The film certainly shifts back fifteen or twenty years to an earlier era of a wilder West.

Henry Hathaway was a classic Western director, and he started back in 1912. Thus, he might have been ideal for The Carpetbaggers for the character as a cowboy actor. With his vast experience, he knew where to find the locations. The background is fabulous.

The film grossed $14 million. Was that mainly in the USA? It has a low profile in the UK, in spite of Steve McQueen’s presence. The BFI Companion to The Western has an entry for the 1975 TV remake, but no entry for the 1966 movie. It just mentions it under Henry Hathaway. The Soundtrack album was issued in America, but not in Britain.

THE PLOT

Sixteen year old Max is out when the three bad guys arrive and torture and kill his parents.

Screenshot 2020-05-13 at 17.56.26

Sam Sands is tied up. The assault on Max’s mother is about to start.

He had seen them on their way in, asking if the house was Sam Sand’s. He arrives home, finds the bodies. He sets fire to the house as a funeral pyre.

Screenshot 2020-05-13 at 17.53.45

Steve McQueen as Max Sands

Max goes off into the desert and finds a rusty old gun. He sees Jonas Cord, a gunsmith travelling along … this is the father of the main character, Jonas Cord Jnr. in the Carpetbaggers.

Max: Now turn around with your hands up.

There’s a line you’ve never heard in a Western before! He threatens Cord, who points out that no one has made ammunition for that model in ten years. Jonas listens to his story and says that he will have to learn to shoot if he wants revenge, and he will teach him how … something of a Western cliché there.

Screenshot 2020-05-13 at 17.55.58

Jonas Cord (Brian Keith) and young Max Sands (Steve McQueen)

Now an accomplished shot, Max joins a cattle drive, and tracks the first killer, Jesse Coe down to Abilene. Coe has the pouch. (Incidentally this character is Dort in the book, and I thought he called him Dort here).

Neesa (Janet Margolin)

He meets a Kiowa ‘$5 dance hall girl’ (which is a euphemism) who helps … Max speaks Kiowa. He goes down to the bar looking to shoot Jesse, but it’s a different one. (Thankfully not Jesse James either). Max finds the right one by the corral, and lets the cattle out of a corral and a knife fight follows. During filming, the cattle were supposed to run through the gate, but they took the fence down too, and Steve McQueen only just managed to roll clear of the hooves. The footage was used. It IS impressive!

Max kills Coe, but is wounded. Neesa takes him back to the Kiowa camp and nurses him back to health. The Kiowa are all good to him … and we’ll assume this group was missed in that forced migration twenty years earlier. The Kiowa chief names Max’s mother as Tabinaka. She’s totally missing from the credits.

He gets a nice clean new denim shirt from somewhere in their camp, whatever. Neesa is fetchingly clad in fringed clean buckskin which would have looked great a few years later at Woodstock. Hollywood film outfitters had racks of these labelled ‘Indian maiden.’

Screenshot 2020-05-13 at 17.55.35

Neesa (Janet Margolin) nurses Max in the Kiowa village

Having recovered, Max now needs to find the other two. He asks another “dance hall girl” who turns out to be Jesse Coe’s widow, but who seems remarkably sanguine about it.

Max discovers that Bowdre, the second killer, is in prison deep in the swamps of Louisiana. Max commits a bank robbery down the road from the prison, deliberately ineptly, and is sent to the same prison.

Welcome to Louisiana …

The trustee is named Big Foot (Pat Hingle) which does not mean he’s a Sasquatch. Bowdre has escaped and is dragged back and flogged, then thrown into the swamp water to drown. Max pulls him out. This gets him into Bowdre’s confidence, who explains he was caught because they got lost.

Bowdre (Arthur Kennedy)

Once a month the girls from the plantation are sent to “entertain” the convicts. (This never happened at Dartmoor). A young Cajun girl, Pilar, chooses Max.

Pilar: Born here, knee-deep in water all my life, and I’ll likely die here.

He realizes she knows the area’s waterways and persuades her to escape with him in a boat, and gets Bowdre to join them. The boat capsizes at the start and she is bitten by a water moccasin snake. She is dying.

Screenshot 2020-05-13 at 17.54.13 \Max carries Pilar (Suzanne Pleshette). Both said they had been good platonic friends for years so found their love scenes acutely embarrassing.

Max shoots Bowdre dead- he had to be the one to do it. (McQueen must have found the swamp escape useful practice for Papillon in 1973).

We cut back to the far West. Max pretends to be the brother to the third. Incongruously there are WANTED posters for Max. In those days? At that distance? With no photographs?He is jailed. A gang break him out of jail not realizing who he is … you may not have seen this cunning plan before, but they attach ropes to the barred window and pull it out of the brickwork with horses. When they discover he’s not the guy they meant to save, they drag him behind a horse through water and across sand. He is saved by a priest and taken to the mission. He looks up at the crucifixion on the wall:

Max: He must have missed somebody! That looks worse than hanging!

The priest expresses surprise that he had never seen a crucifix before. But he had. It was on a little silver chain belonging to a girl he once knew. Pilar. (Dab your eyes). Max is given a bible to read. He’d never learned to read before (Again in the book, that’s explained … the school had refused to teach “half-breeds.”)

He is after Tom Fitch. He lassoes one of Fitch’s men (who is dressed similarly to Fitch) and beats all hell out of him. The lassoing is important in the book, because Smith later becomes a Wild West Show rider. Odd here.

Screenshot 2020-05-13 at 17.54.28

Max kicks all hell out of one of Fitch’s gang

Fitch knows that Max Sand killed Coe and Bowdre and is scared that he’ll turn up.

Tom Fitch: Part-Indian? If there’s anything I can’t stomach, it’s a half-breed!

Screenshot 2020-05-13 at 17.55.11

The Tom Fitch gang with ‘Nevada Smith’ on the left.

They set off to rob a stagecoach, which is the sort of thing gangs do. They pass Jonas Cord, who shouts out ‘Max!’ Max ignores him. Max also ignores Fitch calling ‘Max!’ as he goes up some stairs. Fitch knows one of the gang is Max, but not which one. The gang get the gold. Max watches, and Fitch realizes who he is and tries to flee. Max catches him at a creek. Max is quicker on the draw and shoots Fitch’s gun hand.

Tom Fitch (Karl Malden)

Then he shoots him in one knee, then the other. Fitch begs Max to finish him off, but Max rides off with Fitch begging to be killed … face it, in remote desert, with your hand and both kneecaps gone, the end would be certain.

Nevada Smith DVD

The DVD

Overall, it made a change from a recent diet of 60s British films, but it could have been made anytime between 1950 and 1970. The central figure is wooden (well, Hathaway had directed enough John Wayne to be used to that). In spite of being enigmatic and cold, Max has none of the intrigue or power that Clint Eastwood was to bring to the Man With No Name. Nice scenery. The story has only one surprise, the failure to kill at the end, not that it was an act of mercy. In its relentless pursuit of revenge there is predictability and also an unpleasant edge.

COMMENTS