Only Oscar-winning writer-director Alexander Payne (Sideways) would think to cast the famously handsome George Clooney as a disheveled dad in his outstanding adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings’s tragicomic novel. Clooney dials down the glamour to play Matt King, a Hawaii real-estate attorney with a propensity for unflattering shirts and ill-fitting trousers. When Matt’s wife, Elizabeth, ends up in a coma after a water-skiing accident, Matt must learn to balance the parenting of his resentful daughters, Scottie (Amara Miller) and Alexandra (Shailene Woodley, The Secret Life of the American Teenager), with the sale of a pristine plot of Kauai land that stands to make the King cousins, including scruffy Hugh (Beau Bridges), a fortune. As Elizabeth’s condition worsens, Matt contacts friends and relatives, like her fiercely protective father (Robert Forster), so that they’ll have the chance to say goodbye. In the process, he finds out she was having an affair with realtor Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard, effectively cast against type), so he and the girls, including Alex’s hilariously mellow friend, Sid (Nick Krause), go on an island-hopping trip, ostensibly to add Brian to the mix, but Matt really wants to find out what his wife saw in the guy. His journey from naiveté to knowledge brings out Clooney’s soulful side, creating a believably flawed, deeply sympathetic figure. If Payne leans too heavily on the slack-key soundtrack, his love for his characters, including Judy Greer as Matt’s female counterpart, results in his most emotionally satisfying movie to date. –Kathleen C. Fennessy

 

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Directed by George Marshall
Produced by Joe Pasternak, Written by Max Brand (novel Destry Rides Again), Felix Jackson (screenplay and story), Henry Myers, Gertrude Purcell
Starring Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart, Mischa Auer, Brian Donlevy
Music by Frank Skinner
Cinematography Hal Mohr
Editing by Milton Carruth
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Release date(s) December 29, 1939 (U.S. release)
Running time 94 minutes
Country United States
Language English

Destry Rides Again (AKA The Man from Montana) (1939) is a western starring Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart. The supporting cast includes Mischa Auer, Charles Winninger, Brian Donlevy, Allen Jenkins, Irene Hervey, Billy Gilbert, Bill Cody, Jr., and Una Merkel. The original Max Brand novel was translated into an “oater” with the town of Bottleneck set on a Hollywood sound stage. The movie was directed by George Marshall and is a remake of a 1932 version starring Tom Mix.

In 1996, Destry Rides Again was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

Plot

Saloon owner Kent (Brian Donlevy), the unscrupulous boss of the fictional Western town of Bottleneck, has the town’s Sheriff, Keogh, killed when the Sheriff asks one too many questions about a rigged poker game. Kent and “Frenchy” (Marlene Dietrich), his girlfriend and the dance hall queen, now have a stranglehold over the local cattle ranchers. The crooked town’s mayor, Hiram J. Slade (Samuel S. Hinds), who is in collusion with Kent, appoints the town drunk, Washington Dimsdale (Charles Winninger), as the new sheriff, assuming that he’ll be easy to control and manipulate. But what the mayor doesn’t know is that Dimsdale was a deputy under the famous lawman, Tom Destry and is able to call upon the equally formidable Tom Destry, Jr. (James Stewart) to help him make Bottleneck a lawful, respectable town.

Destry confounds the townsfolk by refusing to strap on a gun in spite of demonstrating that he is an expert marksman. He still carries out the “letter of the law”, as deputy Sheriff, and wins over their respect. A final confrontation between Destry and Kent’s gang is inevitable, but “Frenchy” is won over by Destry and changes sides. A final gunfight ensues where Frenchy is killed in the crossfire, and the rule of law wins the day.

Cast

As appearing in screen credits (main roles identified):^[1]

Actor	Role
Marlene Dietrich	Frenchy, the saloon singer
James Stewart	Thomas Jefferson “Tom” Destry, Jr., the new deputy
Mischa Auer	Boris Callahan, the henpecked Russian
“Charlie” Winninger	“Wash” (Washington Dimsdale), the new sheriff
Brian Donlevy	Kent, the saloon owner
Allen Jenkins	“Gyp” Watson
Warren Hymer	“Bugs” Watson
Irene Hervey	Janice Tyndall
Una Merkel	Lily Belle – “Mrs. Callahan”
Billy Gilbert	“Loupgerou”
Samuel S. Hinds	Judge Slade, the mayor
Jack Carson	Jack Tyndall

Songs

Marlene Dietrich as Frenchy performs the songs “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have” and “You’ve Got That Look”, written by Frank Loesser, set to music by Frederick Hollander, which have become classics.

Production

Famed Western writer Max Brand contributed the novel, Destry Rides Again, but the film also owes its origins to Brand’s serial “Twelve Peers”, published in a pulp-magazine. In the original work, Harrison (or “Harry”) Destry was not a pacifist. As filmed in 1932, with Tom Mix in the starring role, the central character differed in that Destry did wear six-guns in that version.

The film was James Stewart’s first western (he would not return to the genre until 1950, with Broken Arrow and Winchester 73), and was also notable for a ferocious cat-fight between Marlene Dietrich and Una Merkel, which apparently caused a mild censorship problem at the time of release.^[2]

According to writer/director Peter Bogdanovich, Marlene Dietrich told him during an aircraft flight that she and James Stewart had an affair during shooting and that she became pregnant and had the baby surreptitiously aborted without telling Stewart.^[3]

Reception

Destry Rides Again was generally well accepted by the public, as well as critics. It was reviewed by Frank S. Nugent in the The New York Times, who noted that the film did not follow the usual Hollywood type-casting. On Dietrich’s role, he characterized, “It’s difficult to reconcile Miss Dietrich’s Frenchy, the cabaret girl of the Bloody Gulch Saloon, with the posed and posturing Dietrich we last saw in Mr. Lubitsch’s ‘Angel’.” Stewart’s contribution was similarly treated, “turning in an easy, likable, pleasantly humored performance.”^[4]

Other versions

• Universal Pictures released an earlier version, also titled Destry Rides Again (1932), directed by Benjamin Stoloff and starring Tom Mix and Zasu Pitts.^[5]
• An almost shot-for-shot remake of the 1939 production, Destry (1954), was also directed by George Marshall and stars Audie Murphy and Thomas Mitchell.
• A Broadway musical version of the story, Destry Rides Again, opened in New York at the Imperial Theater on April 23, 1959, and played 472 performances. Produced by David Merrick, the show had a book by Leonard Gershe, music and lyrics by Harold Rome, and starred Andy Griffith as Destry and Dolores Gray as Frenchy.
• ABC aired a short-lived television series in 1964, Destry, based on the first two films, starring John Gavin as the son of the movie’s title character.

References

Notes

Bibliography

Links

• Destry Rides Again at the Internet Movie Database
• Destry Rides Again at the TCM Movie Database
• Destry Rides Again at AllRovi
• Destry Rides Again at Rotten Tomatoes

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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