Changing Societies: The Red House, The Hanging Tree, Spencer’s Mountain, and Post-war America

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns argues that the clash between different cultures is a key element of the films of Delmer Daves. He offers a dialectical account of these cultural clashes, suggesting that Daves dramatises social progress by conceiving it as the passage from one social stage to another that supplants, in an act of improvement, the preceding one. Through analysis of three of his films from three different decades and representing three different genres – The Red House, The Hanging Tree, and Spencer’s Mountain – Berns demonstrates the sustained and consistent authorial concern that Daves felt for the betterment of society. What was required, Daves felt, was a community constantly willing to work to achieve social concord. In this regard, Berns’ analysis is one that is contextualised in America’s post-War years, representing a period in which hope was held out for a better society.

Home and the Range: Spencer’s Mountain as Revisionist Family Melodrama

Joseph Pomp offers an analysis of Spencer’s Mountain, a film Daves’ adapted from the novel by Earl Hamner Jr. He observes that Daves’ lack of recognition by auteur theorists was that he often delved into melodramatic themes in his Westerns, themes out of favour with those who preferred the course masculinity of a John Ford or a Raoul Walsh, and who associated the melodrama with a female audience. Pomp suggests that Spencer’s Mountain provides a key window into Daves’ views on American family values, education, and class, arguing that Daves deconstructed melodrama’s ‘classic realist’ paradigm by considering a nascent feminist agenda that undermines the patriarchal underpinnings of the source novel. This, argues Pomp, creates an unusual mix – rendering Spencer’s Mountain different from most other Westerns of the period but also different from most melodramas. Ultimately, Pomp argues, Spencer’s Mountain suggests that fierce, heroic individualism has no place in Daves’ cinematic universe.

Bent, or Lifted Out by Its Roots: Daves’ Broken Arrow and Drum Beat as Narratives of Conditional Sympathy

Józef Jaskulski examines Broken Arrow and Drum Beat, considering the perspective that the latter perpetuates the very Native American stereotypes that the former attempted to amend. He links these two narratives through a contrastive analysis of their respective Native American protagonists: firstly, the noble, articulate Cochise and the obstinate, inarticulate Modoc, Captain Jack; secondly, the female characters of Sonseeahray and Toby. Though it is easy to discard Drum Beat as an essentialist step back in Hollywood’s century-long struggle with the so-called ‘Indian problem’, Jaskulski suggests that Drum Beat serves as a latent supplement to Broken Arrow, which can be read as an important document of Hollywood’s conflicted sentiments toward Native Americans in the late-Truman/early-Eisenhower eras. In particular, reflecting a critique of the major about-face in Federal Indian Policy during the 1940s.

“This Is Where He Brought Me: 10,000 Acres of Nothing!”: The Femme Fatale and other Film Noir Tropes in Delmer Daves’ Jubal

Matthew Carter offers an in-depth examination of Delmer Daves’ Jubal. He contextualises the film within both the Western and Hollywood more generally and argues that, both formally and thematically, it and other prominent Westerns of the time are more closely aligned with film noir than is generally acknowledged to be the case. Applying a psychoanalytical-informed feminist analysis that considers the ideological intent of Jubal’s use of the femme fatale, he evaluates its critical-, or, counter-ideological capacity. From such a reading, he argues that the film’s narrative focus on repressed sexual desires and on the plight of the main female protagonist provides enough material to justify Jubal as constituting a critique of the excesses of patriarchal power.

Introduction: “No One Would Know It Was Mine”: Delmer Daves, Modest Auteur

This extended introduction covers three areas. First, it offers a critical biography of Daves’ life and career, drawing upon archival materials held at the Stanford University library. Second, it offers an overview of the development of auteur theory in film scholarship, explaining the process by which the films of some American moviemakers has been canonized while those of others, despite comparable output and acclaim, has not. Finally, the introduction makes the case that Daves’s work does, in fact, evidence a unique authorial viewpoint, valorising man as a rational rather than instinctual agent in society.

Partial Rehabilitation: Task Force and the Case of Billy Mitchell

Andrew Howe provides an account of one of Daves’ war films. Task Force is a biopic of General Billy Mitchell who, during the 1920s, tirelessly advocated for the concept of the aircraft carrier as the future of naval warfare. In his analysis, Howe posits three central figures: Daves as writer-director, Billy Mitchell as historical inspiration, and lead-actor Gary Cooper, who plays Mitchell’s fictional treatment in the film, Jonathan L. Scott. The chapter situates its analysis of ‘Mitchell’ within the context of the early Cold War years and of the Hollywood of the time. In the case of the latter, it discusses Hollywood’s post-War obsession with the subject of aerial warfare. In contrast to other contributors in this collection, Howe suggests Daves’ greater quality was as a writer, rather than a director, and ranks his best scripting efforts – Task Force included – alongside those of Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray.

Don’t Be Too Quick to Dismiss Them: Authorship and the Westerns of Delmer Daves

Andrew Patrick Nelson offers a revaluation of Broken Arrow, which is often credited with helping to inaugurate a cycle of ‘pro-Indian’ Westerns featuring more sympathetic and even heroic portrayals of aboriginal characters. As a counterpoint to reflectionist readings of the pro-Indian cycle, Nelson explores an alternative explanation for the character of the famous Chiricahua leader, Cochise. He argues that Cochise is, in fact, a common character in Daves’ Westerns: the stoic secondary hero who steadies, strengthens, and defers to the mildly neurotic leading man who, rather than being a natural agent, proceeds based on reason. Re-conceiving Cochise as a ‘Davesian’ character is a small step towards reclaiming Daves’ pivotal role of the development of the Western in the 1950s.

Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma: Aesthetics, Reception, and Cultural Significance

Fran Pheasant-Kelly argues for the status of Delmer Daves as an exemplary filmmaker by offering an in-depth analysis of 3:10 to Yuma. She considers the film in relation to its aesthetics, critical reception, and cultural significance, illuminating Daves’ involvement throughout. Whilst acknowledging the film as one among several significant Westerns Daves directed, her primary focus remains on 3:10 to Yuma as she tried to explain its cultural significance. Overall, her analysis examines the film’s textual aspects, archival material in respect of its critical reception, and its historical contexts. In so doing, she deeply enriches our understanding of the film’s significance in relation to the Hollywood Western genre as a whole.

Delmer Daves, Authenticity, and Auteur Elements: Celebrating the Ordinary in Cowboy

Sue Matheson engages with the common perception that Delmar Daves is a competent but conventional studio man. She argues that his work with the ‘adult’ Western is actually that of an auteur film-maker. Placing Cowboy within the context of the director’s 1950s Westerns, she interprets it as his scalding critique of the coming-of-age Western. In what she sees as a radical departure from the ‘classical’ Western, Matheson details how Cowboy critically interrogates classical notions of frontier manhood, deconstructs the celebration of individualism, and empties the Western landscape of its usual symbolic significance. In short, she forwards Cowboy as a an example of genre critique, suggesting that it gleans mythic images and styles from films like Howard Hawks’ Red River and John Ford’s Stagecoach only to contrast them with its presentations of a more ‘authentic’ West. Overall, Matheson forwards Daves as a mythoclast who examined the darker, more selfish side and appetites of the national character.

This Room is My Castle of Quiet: The Collaborations of Delmer Daves and Glenn Ford

Adrian Danks points out that, although it is relatively common to examine the collaborations between various actors and directors working in the 1950s Western – John Wayne/John Ford, James Stewart/Anthony Mann, etc. – the series of three varied films made by Daves and Glenn Ford between 1956 and 1958 – Jubal, 3:10 to Yuma, and Cowboy – have seldom attracted attention. While at least one of these films, 3:10 to Yuma, has been championed in terms of Daves’ spatially and tonally expressive direction and of Ford’s morally ambiguous but effortlessly genial characterisation, this extraordinary trio of films have seldom been examined in relation to one another. Danks reads the collaboration between Ford and Daves as symptomatic of the work of both actor and director, and their sympathetic, subtle, ‘benevolent’, and relatively unadorned approach to various subjects and character types. In the process, he helps pinpoint some of the key reasons why both of these important but workaday figures have remained relatively underestimated and why they need to be brought to the forefront of a more complex understanding of the variations possible in the ‘classical’ Western.