Jubal is an intense and beautiful Western, photographed in Cinemascope and Technicolor by Charles Lawton, Jr., who worked with Budd Boetticher and John Ford and knew how to capture men on horseback in the wilderness; the mountains, meadows and forests of Jubal are beautiful but the behavior of some of the human beings is sometimes quite ugly. The characters in Jubal may be stereotypes in some ways -- out of "Othello" -- but Daves effectively brings out their personalities: Rod Steiger as Iago, Ernest Borgnine as Othello, Valerie French as Desdemona. Glenn Ford is the drifting character who ends up working at Borgnine's ranch and falls in love with Felicia Farr, who is traveling West with a group of gentle religious zealots, one of whom betrays them, while resisting the flirtations of the boss's wife.
Daves made a number of excellent Westerns, including 3:10 to Yuma in 1957 and The Last Wagon in 1956, before exhausting his limited fatalistic approach to the genre and becoming the house director for Troy Donahue's Warner Brothers melodramas. Jubal is full of elegant compositions and sweeping camera movements that unite the ranch hands to the landscape and Daves does a superb job with the many veteran and new character actors in the film --Noah Beery,Jr; Jack Elam; Charles Bronson (a small but important role), et al.
No comments:
Post a Comment