How do films evoke an identification with one character as opposed to another? Two recent films, The Bourne Ultimatum and No Country for Old Men give us a character who appears to be indomitable, almost supernaturally in control. Both of these characters are professional killers who leave a trail of bodies behind them. Yet we react to them very differently. Jason Bourne is a hero whom we admire and wish to identify with whereas the relentless murderer, Anton Chigurh, in No Country is a bogeyman, a nightmarish figure whom we fear but do not identify with. He may unconsciously act out our most extreme aggressive fantasies, but we tend to place him in our representational world as an external object.
Filmmakers usually allow us to identify with a hero or dis-identify with a villain by manipulating their circumstances and motives. Jason Bourne kills those who attack him. He defends women. Although he is relatively unexpressive, we are led to feel that he can be kind and empathic. He is fighting a cruel system that has made him into a killer by using and corrupting his idealism. The killer in No Country is motivated by greed and self need only, killing people because they get in his way, although observing an odd idiosyncratic moral code.
However, a third character, from another recent film provides us with a model that stands on the prism point between these two archetypes, an object with whom we both wish to identify and fear as an external threat to our moral integrity. I am referring to Ben Wade, the charismatic outlaw, played by Russell Crowe, in 3:10 to Yuma.
This 3:10 to Yuma is the third in a series. The original short story was one of Elmore Leonard’s first publications. The second version was a 1957 feature length film starring Glenn Ford as the outlaw and Van Heflin, the rancher who is trying to get him onto the 3:10 train to Yuma prison. It was compared to and probably modeled after the already successful High Noon, which also focused on mounting tension as the train approached.1 The current version appeared fifty years after the original film. Although the three versions are based upon the same plot, each new version expands upon the story. Leonard’s hero was a lawman holed up in a hotel room with an outlaw he was trying to bring to the prison. The first film version expanded upon that, particularly by making the hero a rancher, a common man who happened into the situation.
In both films, Ben Wade is a notorious outlaw, the leader of a gang that robs and murders. In each, he leads his men in the robbery of a stagecoach, stopping the coach by diverting a herd of cattle into its path. Someone from the coach suddenly grabs one of the outlaws, using him as a shield and threatening to kill him if the outlaws don’t put down their guns. Wade coolly shoots his own man and then the man holding him.
The rancher who owns the cattle and his two sons watch this scene. Wade approaches them and accedes to the rancher, Dan Evans demand to get his cattle back, but takes their horses so that they can’t go for help, promising to leave them for them to pick up further along. He keeps that promise, showing us that he is ruthless, but not wonton. In the ’57 version he also urges the stagecoach owner, caught in the coach, to send the dead man’s body back to his family in Contention, also creating some sympathy for his humanity.
Wade and his men trick the lawmen in Bisbee2 into leaving town to go to the site of the robbery. He lingers with a barmaid, again showing some sensitivity with her, but it costs him. Evans, having met the lawmen, comes back to the bar where he meets Wade and engages in a dialogue, nearly identical in both films, that shows the outlaw avoiding a confrontation, placating Evans repeatedly.
“You got your horses back, didn’t you? And your cattle?”
“Yeah, I got my horses back. But you killed two of my herd.”
“Well they died for a good cause. You know, them beeves of yours. They wouldn’t even have fed a hungry dog. I tell you what. That should cover it.” (throwing him some money) How much you get for a day’s work?”
“$2 when I hire out.”
“Well, there are $2 for half a day.”
“You took up my boys’ time, too.”
“You’re right. I did. (gives him more money) Anything else you wanna get paid for, Dan?”
“You can give me $5 extra.”
“And what’s that for?”
“For making me nervous.”
At this point, the sheriff and his men sneak in to surround Wade and arrest him.
Dan is reluctant to be deputized to help take Wade in, but agrees when he hears that a $200 reward is being offered.
In the ’57 version, they quickly move Wade to Contention, after a short stay for dinner at Dan’s ranch in order to create a diversion to mislead Wade’s gang. Most of that film centers around the dialogue between Dan and Ben Wade as Wade tries to bribe and overpower Dan, all to no avail. At one point in that version, the brother of the man who was shot gets into the room where Dan is guarding Wade, threatening to kill Wade, but Dan overpowers him. The tension mounts as Wade’s gang shows up to free him and the frightened townspeople back off, just as they did in High Noon. In another scene reminiscent of High Noon, Dan’s wife arrives in Contention to try to talk him out of trying to bring Wade to the train. In the final twist, reprising the confrontation at the stage coach, Dan gets Wade to the train and is standing behind him as the gang confronts them. Wade’s number two man, Charlie Prince, tells him to fall down so that they can shoot Dan, but Wade suddenly decides to jump on the train with Evans. When Dan asks him why he did it, he says he owed it to Dan for saving his life in the hotel room and, besides, he’s been in Yuma prison before and escaped. At the end of the film, Dan waves to his wife as the train moves on towards Yuma.
It is a good character study in which the rancher, Evans, maintains his principles and proves his mettle by bringing the outlaw to justice. He wins even the admiration of the outlaw, himself. We are left perhaps with some sympathy for Wade, who shows some humanity and concern, but remains a dangerous criminal who should be brought to justice. Critics were split over which version, ’57 or ’07, they preferred.
The ’07 version uses so much of the dialogue of the original that it gives posthumous credit to the screenwriter of the ’57 film. The plot outline is essentially the same; yet, through a series of changes, the new film is very different from the original with a different perspective on the character of Ben Wade and his relationship with Evans. In the ’57 film, we are much more certain of right and wrong than in the ’07 version, likely a reflection of the differences in culture over that half century. Wade is treated with some sympathy in ’57, but he is basically a “bad guy.” There is much greater ambiguity about his role in ’07.
In the ’50’s version, Dan Evans is the victim of a drought that is close to forcing him to lose his farm. If he has an enemy, it is Mother Nature. In the current version, there is a drought, but his true enemies are human. Whereas the ’57 film begins with the hold up of the stagecoach, the new version begins with an assault upon the family farm. Dan and his family are awakened in the middle of night to find that men have set fire to their barn. Their leader, Tucker, threatens to do more if Dan can’t pay back his loan to Tucker’s boss, Hollander. Viscerally, we experience a brutal attack upon an innocent family, a man and wife and two young boys, that appears far more unjust and heinous than the attack upon the well-armed coach to follow. In a later scene, Dan goes to Bisbee to confront Hollander. He says,
“You got no right to do what you done. You hear me? That’s my land.”
“Come next week it’s not, Evans. You borrowed a good deal of money and I got the rights to recompense.”
“But you damned up my creek. You shut off my water. How’d you expect me to pay off my debts if you can’t …”
Tucker grabs Dan from behind and knocks him down. Hollander answers,
“Before the water touches your land it resides and flows on mine. And as such, I can do with it as I fuckin’ please. Go home and pack up.”
Offering his wife’s brooch as collateral, Dan says, “Can you just let me get to spring. I can turn the corner.”
“Sometimes a man has to be big enough to see how small he is. Railroad’s coming, Dan. Your land’s worth more with you off it.”
In this version, Dan Evans is a “small” man fighting against more powerful forces, the landowner/banker and the railroad. We have an alternative set of villains, the sadistic Tucker, his boss, Hollander, and in more subtle tones, the railroad tycoons who are ruthlessly transforming the land.
In the ’57 version, Wade’s gang is robbing the stage coach, which carries money belonging to the stage coach company. In the ’07 film, the coach, which is heavily armed and guarded by Pinkertons, is the property of the railroad, the same railroad that is planning to run through Evans’s farm. We don’t know this when we see the outlaws attacking the coach. Our sympathies tend to be with the defenders, although it looks like a very fair fight, with the driver and his shotgun man firing away with a Gatling gun. It is only gradually that we realize that the coach belongs to the railroad. By bringing this in subtly, we are pulled between two different poles without being fully aware. It is natural to side with defenders rather than attackers, to side with the law against outlaws; nevertheless, we also side with the family and the individual man against the powerful socio-economic forces that come to crush them.
The other major change in the new version is in the image of Dan Evans. As in the ’50’s film he is a rancher and family man who is struggling to make ends meet, but now he is further disadvantaged. He has lost a leg in the civil war and appears weak and relatively helpless early in the film facing off against Tucker and Hollander and their gang. In the opening scene, as he rushes out to save his barn, he is hit from behind by one of Tucker’s men and is lying on his belly when Tucker looks down at him from his horse. In the later scene, in Bisbee, he is dismissed by Hollander and once again knocked down onto the dusty street by Tucker.
If we have any doubts about the intended meaning of Evan’s disability, we can look to the way he is seen by his family. Only the younger son, Mark, himself hampered by a lung disease, is openly admiring of his father. Dan’s wife, Alice, confronts him after the barn burning with not having consulted her about buying feed for the cattle and medicine for Mark before paying the loan to Hollander. Later, Dan is upset that Wade, eating in their home, is speaking to his wife. Wade is courteous, but flirtatious. He tells her about a sea captain’s daughter he knew in San Francisco with beautiful green eyes, “Like yours. And I’d stare deep into them. They’d just change colors in front of me. All the colors of the sea.” Dan tells her not to talk to Wade. His words to her moments later confirm a suspicion of jealousy and self-doubt.
“Now, I’m tired, Alice. I’m tired of watching my boys go hungry. I’m tired of the way that they look at me. I’m tired of the way that you don’t. I’ve been standing on one leg for three damn years waiting for God to do me a favor and He ain’t listening.”
But the primary focus is on Dan’s relationship with his older son, William. A pre-adolescent in ’57, William has aged a few years in the half decade. He is a precocious 14 year old who has no faith in his father. In the opening scene after Tucker and his men have ridden off, William picks up a rifle and aims at them in the darkness. Dan stops him, saying, “I’ll take care of this.” William answers, “No, you won’t.” The look between father and son speaks volumes to the son’s loss of faith in his father. The next day, when they are out searching for their cattle, Dan says, “Some day William, you walk in my shoes, you might understand.” William answers, “I ain’t never walking in your shoes.”
To this mix we add Ben Wade. In the opening scene, before the fire is set, we see William in bed next to his younger brother, reading a book by candlelight, “The Deadly Outlaw”. After seeing Wade draw and shoot his own man and the Pinkerton behind him, as in the original film, William looks awestruck, saying simply, “He’s fast.”
For the rest of the film, Dan Evans and Ben Wade appear to be competing for William’s admiration and his soul. We are made to feel that one of Dan’s most powerful motives in the film is to win his son’s respect. In part, this is for his own self respect, but it also hinges on the dynamic in the opening scene when he stops his son from shooting at Tucker. He doesn’t want his son to grow up to be violent like Wade. The filmmakers have drawn our attention to this dynamic, pressing us into involvement in the struggle between the two men for the boy. At one point, after William has followed the party taking Wade to contention, Wade tells Dan, “He’s following me.” Dan tells him that his son won’t grow up to be like Wade.
We can’t help identifying with Dan, a man struggling to support his family, but we feel that he is castrated and weak; Ben Wade is whole and strong. Evans appears to be helpless in the face of the banker and the railroad men, the oncoming roll of industrialization. Wade is confident and victorious with them. He has robbed the stagecoach so many times that he taunts the Pinkertons, “It’s probably cheaper just to let me rob the damned thing.”
We, the viewers, are also caught between Dan and Ben Wade. Seeing Dan Evans struggle to survive, seeing him bullied by Tucker and Hollander, seeing him as a husband and father trying to fight against the powerful banker and the railroad, we wish that he had the power to fight against those forces and prevail. Ben Wade has that power.
We first see Ben Wade dressed in black, on his horse, drawing a picture of a bird. Before we see him as a killer, we see him as an artist, as having sensitivity. He is set apart from his gang. Charlie Prince and other members of the gang ruthlessly kill the wounded Pinkertons after the battle. Charlie Prince has shot their leader, Byron McAvoy, and is about to finish him when Wade spares him, saying, “I ain’t gonna kill you. Not like this.” In fact, he is the only member of the gang to engage anyone else in the film on a first name basis. Charlie Prince calls Byron “Pinkerton” as he shoots him. Except for Wade, himself, he does not see people. Ben Wade does.
When Charlie Prince comes to tell him the stage is coming, he doesn’t answer, merely riding near the men and staying behind when they attack. He is not involved in the intense gunfight. Instead he watches impassively from above, like an aloof general, then coolly directs Dan’s cattle onto the road, blocking the coach and causing it to crash. Without ever saying a word or firing a gun (except for the shots to get the cattle moving), he wins the battle.
Even Wade’s capture appears to be under his own control. In the ’57 version, he does appear to be unaware that the marshal and his men have returned to town while he has been with the barmaid. In this version, we see him looking out the window as they ride into town. He knows they are there, even offers the woman an opportunity to escape out the window with him. Nevertheless, he goes down to the bar to barter with Dan, as in the original, until he is taken, seemingly unawares. He seems to be, at the least, flirting with danger, at most, orchestrating his own capture.
Throughout his captivity, he wears a wry smile, as if he knows he can end this game at any time. And, in fact, he is seemingly able to kill and escape his captors at will. Despite being shackled, he kills one of his guards at night. Later they are riding by day when Byron gets into a dialogue with him. He appears to be calm until Byron says that Wade’s mother was a whore. Suddenly, he leaps at Byron, knocking him off his horse, grabs him and saying, “Even a bad man loves his mother”, tosses him into a ravine killing him, then confronts the others with Byron’s gun. He would have escaped except that William, who has been following them, suddenly appears with his rifle pointed at Wade.
But Wade escapes again. This time Dan is guarding him while he walks off to urinate. Suddenly, Wade disappears in the dark. He reappears behind Dan, pushing him down and whispering that there are Apache out there aiming at them. Sure enough a shot is fired, wounding Dan. Somehow, during the brief gunfight that ensues, Wade manages to get behind the three Apache gunmen, killing them, then runs off.
In our eyes, as in the eyes of William Evans, Ben Wade has the power and charisma to fight the bankers and the railroad magnates. They fear him. But the film takes it one step further, relatively early in the film, as Wade enacts Dan Evans’s revenge upon Tucker. It happens while Evans, Butterfield, the railroad’s agent, and a group of men from Bisbee, including Tucker, are taking the shackled Wade to Contention. While they are camped at night, Tucker takes a turn guarding him. He begins to sing, “They’re gonna hang me in the morning” over and over in a high pitched, reedy voice. Wade asks him to stop, but Tucker continues, obviously gaining sadistic pleasure. Suddenly, we see everyone awakened to find Wade on top of Tucker, repeatedly stabbing him in the throat with his fork. Afterwards, with Tucker dead, Wade and Evans have the following dialogue:
“Something on your mind, Dan?”
“Why’d you kill Tucker? Why not me? Or Butterfield?”
“Well, Tucker took my horse. Did you like him, Dan?”
“No.”
“He told me he burnt down your barn.”
“He was an asshole. But wishing him dead and killing him are two different things.”
“Your conscience is sensitive, Dan. I don’t think it’s my favorite part of you.”
At another point he tells Dan that his anger is the part he does like. Here lies the crux of our ambivalence about Ben Wade. We also wish Tucker dead and in some ways are grateful to Wade for killing him. He is a temptation to leave behind our consciences. Dan Evans pulls us back to a moral course. In another film, if it were Jason Bourne exacting vengeance while suitably hating himself for being a killer, we would openly cheer Tucker’s death, but here we sit uneasily, our own conflicting feelings exposed as we try to decide how we feel about Ben Wade. Is he like a therapist, trying to help his patient overcome inhibitions that keep him from defending himself; or, is he the Devil tempting him and us to abandon our morals?
This is the central struggle in the film. In the ’57 version it was a battle between right and wrong and we admire Dan for remaining steadfast. In the current film, the struggle is more between conscience and legitimate anger, between the sometimes necessary need to fight for oneself against the dictates of a firm conscience. In part, this struggle is over William, to keep him from chasing a life like Wade’s. But it is also for Dan, himself and for the film’s audience. It is very easy to look at the film as a version of the temptations of Christ or even Job. We admire this ordinary man who maintains his convictions despite all the threats and temptations. We would like to be like Dan Evans. But we would also like to be like Ben Wade.
To add to our confusion, there are signals throughout the film that Wade is protecting Dan. We saw it in the bar in Bisbee. In both versions of the film, as Wade is being led away from Dan’s house, he thanks Dan’s wife for her hospitality and adds, “Hope I can send your husband back all right.” In the context, it is an ambiguous statement. Dan’s boys afterward wonder if it means he’ll kill Dan, but particularly in the ’07 film, I had a sense that it might be taken literally.
At other times in the film, Wade points out to Dan that he has no business in bringing him in, reminding him that he is not a lawman and doesn’t work for the railroad. He emphasizes that issue of allegiance shortly before they are going to leave the hotel room to meet the 3:10 train. By this time, Dan and William are virtually alone. Wade argues,
“Now what you gotta figure is why you and your boy are gonna die. Because Butterfield’s railroad lost some money?”
This time Dan lets us know that he got that lesson. Butterfield is backing down in the face of overwhelming odds after Wade’s gang has offered the townspeople a bounty to kill the men bringing Wade to the train. Butterfield offers to pay Dan the $200 even if he doesn’t go through with it. Dan makes the argument for the disaffected and effectively expresses his anger at society, also insuring his family’s welfare.
“You know this whole ride that’s been nagging on me. That’s what the government gave me for my leg, $198.36. And the funny thing is that when you think about it, which I have been lately, was they weren’t paying me to walk away. They were paying me so they could walk away.”
When he gets Butterfield to agree to pay his wife $1,000 and ensure that Hollander doesn’t interfere with his water or land, he turns to Wade to be a witness, subtly letting us know that in this they are allies.
Other pieces begin to fall into place as well. Wade speaks directly to William, trying to get him to talk his father out of bringing him to the train. By this time, some viewers may be unsure if his motive is simply to protect himself, but also to protect Dan and William. Wade tells William that if they go through with it, his gang will kill them both “and laugh while they do it.” William says,
“Call them off.”
“Why should I?”
“Because you’re not all bad.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You saved us from those Indians.”
“I saved myself.”
“You got us through the tunnels. You helped us get away.”3
“If I’d had a gun in them tunnels, I would have used it on you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Kid, I wouldn’t last five minutes leading an outfit like that if I wasn’t rotten as hell.”
Wade seems to be going out of his way to convince the boy that he is no good. The boy, feeding upon his adolescent male crush sees some of the same things that we, the viewers have seen, that Wade at times appears to be helping and protecting. Wade goes out of his way to deny that role. Are we to believe that that is how Wade views himself? There is evidence for that. But in this particular dialogue, the filmmakers are giving us another option, a screen cliché going back to the days of Edward G. Robinson, that the villain does not want the young boy to identify with him and share his fate. He altruistically pushes the boy back to his father. It is a cliché, but it remains effective.
This view is supported by the dialogue that then ensues between father and son, solidifying their bond and reassuring us that the boy will maintain his father’s values.
“Pa, I can’t. I can’t just leave you.”
“I’m gonna be a day behind you, William, unless something happens, and if it does, I need a man at the ranch to run things, protect our family, and I know that you can do that because you’ve become a fine man, William. You’ve become a fine man. You got all the best parts of me, what few there are. And you just remember that your old man walked Ben Wade to that station when nobody else would.”
We are left wondering why Wade should be sympathetic to father and son. In the ’57 film, Wade attributes his helping Dan to Dan’s having saved his life. We get a sense in that film that Wade has some element of fairness, although it is not a totally satisfying explanation. At least one reviewer attributed Wade’s change in attitude to “Stockholm syndrome.” In this version, it is more often Wade who saves Dan’s life. The filmmakers give us a short piece of dialogue to help us “understand” Ben Wade. It is as if they wanted to explain Wade’s sympathy with Dan in the first film.
Wade is sitting calmly, drawing as he speaks. (We’ll later see that he has drawn a likeness of Dan.) Throughout the film, he has quoted scripture. Now he asks,
“You ever read the bible, Dan? I read it one time. I was eight years old. My daddy just got hisself killed over a shot of whiskey and my mama said, ‘We’re going back East to start over.’ So she gave me a bible, sat me down in the train station, told me to read it. She was gonna get our tickets. Well, I did what she said. I read that bible from cover to cover. It took me three days. She never came back.”
History explains motivation. The filmmakers are signaling us that Ben Wade has been traumatized by the loss of his inadequate parents. It reverberates with what he tells Byron before he throws him over a cliff, “Even a bad man loves his mama.” We could add that an abandoned child often blames himself and directs his anger elsewhere. There are even hints that he is searching for his mother in the woman with “green eyes”, which may not be merely a flirtatious line.
More significantly, they are suggesting to us, as subtly as they can get away with, that he looks with envy upon this intact family and would have wanted a father like Dan Evans. Perhaps that is also why he keeps urging Dan not to abandon his family by getting himself killed in this venture.
This concise history gives us a reason to believe that Wade admires Dan for sticking to his values, remaining with his family. As we sit in the theater watching the film, it is natural for most of us to identify with the man who is struggling to raise his children and support his family as most of us do. We have some admiration, for some more unconscious than conscious, for the dashing outlaw who can defy the laws of man and nature, but we know that we can’t be him. What the film gives us is a subtle message that beneath the tough exterior, this outlaw admires people like us, peaceful people supporting our families.
In fact, the filmmakers need all the plot motivation they can to hold us through this film’s most improbable ending. They will attempt to have us believe that Wade will voluntarily help Evans take him to the train while his own men are shooting at him, trying to stop it.
I think for most viewers this is a breaking point that says something about what makes us accept improbabilities in a film. I believe that the suspension of disbelief is usually based more upon the wishes that the film has created, aided by a few props, than upon our sense of realism. This kind of film is more like a daydream than a slice of life, and if we wish enough to disbelieve, we can overcome major breaks with reality.
In this case, however, the film has created a strong ambivalence towards Wade. Watching the film, I was aware of the pull on me to see Wade as an ally, but my judgment, aided by my own role as a clinician and Evans’s steadfast attitude, told me that he was a psychopath, trying to trick me into liking him. Watching the final scenes of the film I found myself unable to believe the premise, but wishing that I could.
The premise is that Wade has given himself over completely to his buried wish for an intact family and his admiration of a father who stays with his family and protects his sons. It is a premise that also suggests that Wade, himself, has been ambivalent about his life and his homicidal gang. We have seen it in his aloofness from his men during the attack upon the stage. In retrospect it is suggested again when he sends the gang off across the border while he lingers with the barmaid in Bisbee. It is as if the filmmakers in 2007 wondered how this somewhat sensitive man could stay with a “an outfit like that” with whom you have to be rotten, as if they speculated that he wanted to get rid of his gang by sending them off and lingering to get caught in Bisbee. But if he allows himself to be captured, that suggests a greater ambivalence, a struggle between his need for survival and for penance. In the end, he appears to disavow his allegiance to the psychopathic Charlie Prince and the other criminals who follow him.
In a reprise of the film’s opening, William diverts a penned herd of cattle between the gunman and Dan and Wade. Dan gets Wade to the train and all appears to be well. Suddenly, however, Wade shouts, “No!” and we see Charlie Prince shooting Dan in the back. As Dan lies there dying, Wade turns on his men, shooting Charlie Prince then shooting the rest of the gang. He holds the dying Charlie Prince in his arms, a psychopath betrayed by the one man he trusted.
It appears that Wade has fully renounced the violence by killing off his gang and siding with the family values. We are left to speculate that Dan’s death reprises Wade’s father’s murder. In a rage, he avenges Dan’s death and renounces the violence of his gang. In an expected touch, William points his gun at Wade at the end, but cannot kill him in cold blood, justifying his father’s values.
But even here, the ending is ambiguous. If Wade wants his penance, his punishment, he also takes care of his survival. He has told Dan his “secret”, that he has been to Yuma prison a couple of times and escaped (repeating a similar line in the ’57 film). As the train heads towards Yuma, he whistles to get his horse to follow alongside the train, as if preparing that escape and maintaining his dual role as hero and psychopath. 4
1. The new film has an homage to High Noon. The marshall in Contention is Will Doane, the original name for Gary Cooper’s character in High Noon, and his deputies are Harvey Pell, Cooper’s deputy, and Sam Fuller, Mrs. Ramirez’s assistant.
2. Russell Crowe seems to be tied to Bisbee. I believe that that was the hometown of his prostitute/girlfriend in LA Confidential.
3. This refers to another episode in the film in which Wade and his captors found themselves allied against another common enemy.
4. If anyone finds it hard to believe that a horse can keep pace with a train, they should probably be watching another movie.There is one last irony. In Russell Crowe’s other prominent film in 2007, American Gangster, he plays Richie Roberts, the honest cop who finally takes down the drug empire of the homicidal, but charismatic and likeable Frank Lucas.
Published in the most recent edition of the PANY Bulletin, Spring, 2008 (46:1)