Three More Films by Gordon Douglas

Since I wrote about Gordon Douglas last month I have seen three more of his films on Turner Classic Movies and it has become unsurprisingly clear that this protean director was fascinated by questions of identity and one's place in society.

I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) could have been just a crime movie, as the Communist Party was portrayed basically as a group of thugs.  (Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street, 1953, about communist spies, was changed to a story about drug dealers when it was dubbed into French). The Party is trying to infiltrate the steel industry in Pittsburgh and Matt Cvetic joins as an undercover FBI agent.  Only his priest knows the truth and the rest of his family, especially his son, treat him as just "a slimy red."  Pittsburgh is beautifully portrayed as a city of fog, rain and smoke, most of the film taking place during the night. Cvetic is a first-generation American who has to pretend that he is something other than what he is and even his neighbor tells him to stop teaching kids about baseball because "baseball is an American game," though the communist rallies have pictures of Washington and Lincoln hanging next to Stalin, while they show contempt for Jews and Negroes. When Cvetic is needed to testify against party members he is finally able to resume his "real" identity as a patriotic American.

Fort Dobbs (1958) and Yellowstone Kelly (1959) are Westerns starring Clint Walker, who played Cheyenne on TV for six years (will there ever be another TV Western?)  In both  he is photographed from low angles, to make him appear heroic, but in both films he plays a loner who can't stand society because he has no place there.  Fort Dobbs was influenced by John Ford's The Searchers (1956); even its score by Max Steiner resembles Steiner's score for the Ford film. Fort Dobbs, however, is shot in beautiful black-and-white, by cinematographer William Clothier, who did the same for Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1961).  In both films Walker makes something of a return to society by taking a child (Fort Dobbs) or an injured Indian woman (Yellowstone Kelly) in his arms rather in the way Ethan Edwards did at the end of The Searchers.

Both Douglas films are sympathetic to the plight of the Indians, driven from their land by white men; this is common in most A Westerns, where the cavalry does not ride to the rescue but to the destruction of the Native Americans.  Both Douglas Westerns were written by Burt Kennedy and have much in common with the Westerns he was writing at around the same time for Budd Boetticher; the showdown in Fort Dobbs between Walker and Brain Keith is very similar to that between Randolph Scott and Claude Akins in the Kennedy/Boetticher Comanche Station (1960).  Boetticher had the advantage of Randolph Scott for his lead, but Gordon Douglas was able to get moving performances from Clint Walker by playing him off Virginia Mayo (in Dobbs) and Ed Byrnes (in Yellowstone), who is almost as good as Ricky Nelson was in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959).