Not a Fool: The Importance of Portraying Dr. Watson Correctly

All but four of the original sixty Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle (also known as the “canon”) are narrated by Dr. John Watson. 

You know what that tells us? Watson is not merely a sidekick. He’s not an afterthought. He’s not just the comic relief. He’s not a cardboard cut-out for Holmes to bounce ideas off. 

He’s important. He’s intelligent. He matters. 

And woe be unto you, filmmakers, if you portray him any differently. Why? Because it ruins your Sherlock Holmes. 

Case in point? The Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce films and radio shows from the 1930s and 1940s. Taken by himself, Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes would come across as austere, acerbic, and ostentatiously intelligent, much like the canonical character. But Nigel Bruce’s Dr. Watson is a bumbling, blundering, burbling fool. 

Watson in the canon is not a fool. He is a doctor, for crying out loud! He’s been through medical school and is a licensed practitioner who builds up a thriving private practice over the course of the stories. He was an officer in the British army who survived a war. He does not bumble. He is, in fact, smarter than most ordinary citizens, including many of those in the audience. 

He simply isn’t as smart as Sherlock Holmes, because Holmes is brilliant. An actual genius. 

But, it’s hard to write characters who are geniuses. I get that. It’s much easier to write someone very smart. And then you can make that smart person look like a genius if you contrast them with a fool. The writers of the Rathbone/Bruce adventures took this route. Make Holmes look smarter by making Watson look dumber. It’s easy. 

It’s lazy, but it’s easy. 

Honestly, if he was paired with a better Watson, Rathbone would probably be one of my favorite Sherlocks. And I don’t blame Nigel Bruce here — he’s acting the part he was given. I blame the writers. 

Now you’re shrugging and saying, “So what? So they were lazy. Holmes still looks smart. Good enough.” 

Except he doesn’t. Not if you pay more than a smidgeon of attention to the stories. Rathbone’s Holmes comes across as intelligent, yes. But because Watson is foolish and inept, whenever Holmes criticizes him for missing a clue or not understanding something, that doesn’t make Holmes look clever. It makes him look mean and petty. “Watson, how could you have missed something so absurdly simple?” Um, well… because he’s simple and foolish himself? Not surprising that he missed it, really. Just surprising that Sherlock Holmes keeps him around at all, since he’s always getting in the way and bogging cases down and messing things up. 

In fact, Holmes must not actually be all that smart if he lets Watson make so many mistakes. Also, Watson really must be a fool if he doesn’t realize he’s constantly being bullied and manipulated. I really don’t see why they’d be friends at all. 

Those are the dangers of portraying Dr. Watson incorrectly. Your Holmes looks petty and careless at best, mean and illogical at worst. Your Watson looks stupid at best and sycophantic at worst. 

But what if you portray him correctly, as an educated man of science with a keen knowledge of human behavior and emotion? Then your Sherlock Holmes must be even smarter, which means he’s obviously a genius. 

This is what the Granada productions got so perfectly correct. Jeremy Brett’s Holmes is clearly exceptionally intelligent because both David Burke and Edward Hardwicke portray Watson as bright and sensible. This Holmes thinks circles around this Watson, so he could think circles around any of us. We see and understand his brilliance. 

The same goes for the BBC’s Sherlock. Martin Freeman’s John Watson is smart and brave, cunning and careful. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock’s intellect, by comparison, is dizzying. These Sherlocks do chide these Watsons for failing to see or understand, but because we in the audience know we would fail in the same way, we understand. We agree. We stand in awe of the great detective’s mind, as we should. We see Sherlock Holmes as A. Conan Doyle intended, because we see Dr. Watson as he wrote him too. 

You could almost say it’s… elementary.

(This post originally appeared in Femnista magazine on October 30, 2018.)

Announcing the Have Yourself a Comic Little Christmas Blogathon

Did I just finish co-hosting a blogathon yesterday?  Yes.  Does that mean it's time to announce another blogathon?  Also, yes!

My redoubtable cohort Quiggy/Jim over at The Midnite Drive-In and I have been up to our usual hijinks, dreaming up fun blogging events to spread movie-related cheer.  This time, we're focusing on Christmas comedies because there are so many wonderful and funny holiday movies out there!  We hereby invite you to join us December 5 and 6 for the Have Yourself a Comic Little Christmas Blogathon!

We don't have a lot of rules for this blogathon, but we do have a few:

1.  Movies and TV show episodes are eligible

2.  Only one duplicate per title

3.  Only new blog posts, please -- don't link to something you wrote previously

4.  Please keep all posts family friendly.  Obviously, there are some R-rated Christmas comedies out there, and if you want to review one of those, okay.  But your review should be PG-rated.

Drop a comment on either this post or Quiggy's post and let us know what you want to contribute to the event!

Don't forget to grab a button and use it on your own blog (and in your post) to spread the news about this blogathon.

The Participants:

+ Hamlette's Soliloquy: The Santa Clause (1994)

+ The Midnite Drive-In: The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) and It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie (2002)

+ Dubsism: Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

+ 18 Cinema Lane: Holiday Inn (1942)

+ RealWeegieMidget Reviews: National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989)

+ Movies Meet Their Match: Eloise at Christmastime (2003)

+ The Wonderful World of Cinema: The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

+ Silver Screen Classics and Nostalgia: Larceny, Inc. (1942)

+ Silver Screenings: Holiday Affair (1949)

+ You!

Why I Watch Film Noir (Even Though I'm a Christian)

Happy Noirvember, fellow film noir enthusiasts!

I had someone ask me recently (in real life, not online) why and how I, as a Christian, can love the film noir genre.  They themselves have not watched much noir, but they did have a basic understanding of it: that it explores the dark side of society.  Noir is full of the back alleys and mean streets where bad things happen.  Why would I, as a Christian, want to watch movies that are about bad people doing bad things?

It's a valid question, and I decided to explore it.

Why do I watch film noir?  What draws me to these dense, dark, movies focused on mankind's worst side?  Is it just sort of prurient, vicarious thrill?  I can talk all day long about the inventive cinematography and the archetypical characters and the brilliant dialog, but the fact remains that noir films are not nice.  They involve bad people doing bad things.  And, yes, they also involve good people trying to bring bad people to justice -- at least, that's how it goes in the ones I love.  But noir films don't always end with the good guy winning.

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, The Big Sleep (1946)

So I thought about it for a while, and I think that the reason I love noir is that no other film genre depicts so clearly that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23) and that "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23).  Westerns hit on that second one a lot, too -- and so do action movies and mysteries.  But they tend to have a hero/heroine who is a pretty good guy/girl overall.  Not noir, not always.

In film noir, for every good cop who marries the wrong woman, ala Crime of Passion (1956), you have a "good" cop who digs himself deeper and deeper into trouble while trying to cover up a sin, ala Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950).  For every sweet wife who married the wrong guy, ala The Blue Dahlia (1946), you have the "sweet" wife who is deeply involved in a number of crimes, ala Murder, My Sweet (1944).  You quickly learn, while watching noir, that anyone is capable of anything.  We are all born sinful, and we all teeter on the edge of embracing our sinful desires, every day.

Alan Ladd, The Blue Dahlia (1946)

Film noir tends not to show any solution for this other than "trying really hard to be a good person," so they are basically all Law and no Gospel.  But I don't watch movies to learn about my Savior, I watch them to learn about my fellow humans.  Modern movies tend to be very humanistic, touting the idea that "all people are born basically good and get corrupted by what happens to them."  Which is hogwash, according to the Bible.

It's also hogwash according to film noir.  Nobody has to teach the characters in noir to be bad.  Nobody has to try hard to become bad.  All they have to do is stop fighting NOT to be bad.  Every Walter Neff (Double Indemnity, 1944) has a chance to walk away from that ankle bracelet dangled in front of them, and it's his fault and his alone if he walks toward it instead.  Every Frank Bigelow (D.O.A., 1949) has a chance to stay in his room, stay sober, stay faithful to his fiancée, and it's no one else's fault if he decides not to do any of those.

Russell Crowe, L. A. Confidential (1997)

Even much of neo-noir confirms this.  From the absolute absence of truly good and morally upright cops in L. A Confidential (1997) to the endless lies coming from every mouth in The Usual Suspects (1995), they continually showcase the Biblical truth that "I was sinful from birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me" (Psalm 51:5).

The tricky part of enjoying film noir as a Christian is figuring out how to learn the right lessons from it.  Because noir makes every brand of sin look awfully fun.  This is part of why I tend to stick to the classic noir of the 1940s and 1950s, because they will imply but not show a great deal of that, which makes it easier to avoid falling into sins like lust or condoning sinful behavior while watching them.  And that's something that is up to each individual's own conscience -- one person can watch things and be unaffected that could seriously harm another person, so you have to figure out for yourself what lines you need to draw for what you watch.  But that doesn't only apply to film noir, it's an issue for all movies, TV shows, and books.

This has been my second contribution to Back in Black: Another Film Noir Blogathon.  Be sure to check out all the great entries!

Back in Black: Another Film Noir Blogathon

Welcome to Back in Black: Another Film Noir Blogathon!  Happy Halloween and happy Noirvember to all celebrate :-)

I'm so glad you're joining my co-host Quiggy at The Midnite Drive-In and me as we celebrate our love of film noir.  What better way for a cinephile to celebrate Halloween than by delving into this classic dark genre, right?  I'm so excited to read about all these darkly delicious movies!

Participants, please drop a link to your post(s) in the comments of this post or Quiggy's post, and we'll get you added to the roster.  Thanks!

Roster

review of The Unfaithful Wife (1969)

at RealWeegieMidget Reviews

review of Out of the Past (1947)

at The Midnite Drive-In

review of D. O. A. (1988)

at The Midnite Drive-In

review of The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

at Hamlette's Soliloquy

review of The Docks of New York (1928)

at Stories of the Jazz Age

review of Hollow Triumph (1948)

at Kristina's Speakeasy

review of Murder, My Sweet (1944)

at Make Mine Film Noir

review of The Woman in the Window (1944)

at Seven Doors of Cinema

(or on YouTube at Tell Me a Movie)

review of Johnny Eager (1941)

at Crítica Retrô

review of Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

at Smoke in the Library

review of Angel Heart (1987)

at Diary of a Movie Maniac

review of The 39 Steps (1935)

at Movies Meet Their Match

musings on reconciling film noir and faith

at Hamlette's Soliloquy

review of The Thirteenth Floor (1999)

at The Midnite Drive-In

list of favorite Ida Lupino noir films

at Whimsically Classic

review of Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

at 18 Cinema Lane

"The Asphalt Jungle" (1950)

I spent about thirty years wanting to see The Asphalt Jungle (1950), but also a little afraid to watch it because I was worried it would disappoint me.  You see, I fell head over heels for Blackboard Jungle (1955) when I was fifteen, and I read in one of the random movie-trivia books I collected that the title for it was a riff on the title for one of the greatest noir movies ever, The Asphalt Jungle.  And that made me want to see this film.  But it also made me worry that maybe this wouldn't live up to how amazing Blackboard Jungle is.

Well, I'll never love Asphalt the way I love Blackboard, but that is just fine because they are wildly different movies, and I liked The Asphalt Jungle enough to add it to my movie collection after the first viewing, and watch it all a second time for this review.  Doesn't hurt that it kickstarted my emerging appreciation of Sterling Hayden.

The basic premise is this:  fresh out of prison, Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) contacts a bookie called Cobby (Marc Lawrence) to ask if he knows some men who would be interested in participating in a heist.  He needs a "box man" (safecracker), a "hooligan" (muscle), a getaway driver, and a financial backer.  Cobby thinks this sounds like a great idea and suggests someone for each role.  The first part of the movie is basically "let's put together a team."

There is some SPOILAGE scattered throughout this review from here on out, but I try not to let slip the actual ending of the movie or what happens to various characters.  

Family man Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso) is perpetually strapped for cash because he doesn't have a real job, but his baby keeps getting sick, and he's a great safecracker, so he signs on to be Riedenschneider's box man.

Horse-crazy Kentuckian William "Dix" Handley (Sterling Hayden) has a bad habit of picking losing horses and then having to go rob some store or whatever to get the money to pay his gambling debts to Cobby.  He'll be the hooligan in case there's trouble that needs to get punched in the face.  

Diner cook Gus Minissi (James Whitmore) is always ready to help a friend or passing acquaintance out, as long as it involves doing something illegal, plus he's always loaning money to people and then having none of his own, so he joins the crew as the getaway driver.

And bigtime lawyer Alonzo D. Emmerich (Louis Calhern -- who was also in Blackboard Jungle, coincidentally) offers to be the backer for private reasons of his own.  Those private reasons?  He's broke, partly because he spends way too much money on his cute little twinkie in the city, Angela (Marilyn Monroe).

Cobby helps connect the team members to each other and gets a cut of the take for his troubles.

I keep reading reviews for this movie that opine about how the Hays Code forced the filmmakers to shoehorn the moral "crime does not pay" into what would otherwise be a superb caper film.  I beg to disagree.  It's the fact that the criminals all pay such a high price for their lawbreaking that makes this film a masterpiece.  If they'd gotten away with the heist, fenced the jewels, and each walked off rich... that's so boring.  Who cares?  But the way their own inner demons doomed them all to fail from the start -- that's the stuff classic storytelling is made of.  (I'm sorry if you feel like that is spoilage -- but a heist film made under the Hays Code should have a pretty obvious ending, so I think I wrote that vaguely enough that you can still watch this for the first time and have surprises coming your way.)

Louis Ciavelli's besetting sin?  I think he's lazy.  Instead of getting a steady job and working hard at it, he floats around doing semi-legal and illegal things.  Dix's is gambling.  Gus's is... boredom, maybe?  The inability to mind his own business?  The desire to stick it to the cops?  Maybe all of them.  Emmerich has two: committing adultery with his little girlfriend while his wife is sick, and lying to everyone about everything, all the time.  Cobby's is greed, always trying to get a slice of whatever illegal is going on.  And Riedenschneider's downfall is tied to his pet sin of pedophilia.

So when this bunch of lowlifes plans the perfect heist, and things start to go wrong, everything doesn't fall apart because of a surprise burglar alarm or a stray bullet or the Hays Code, not really.  It goes wrong because each of the perpetrators is a sinful human being who has been indulging their vices and started traveling the road to ruin long before the movie begins.  The heist just speeds up their inevitable individual downfalls.

That's something film noir excels at, isn't it?  Showing us how one wrong decision will lead to another and another, a food chain of mistakes and misdeeds that will eventually swallow a person whole.  Occasionally, a character in a noir picture can break free of their shuffle toward doom by doing something very, very right and noble and good.  And you do run across noir characters whose only bad decisions involve being too nice to someone or loving someone too much, like Dix's sorta-girlfriend Doll (Jean Hagen).  But all great film noir revolves around someone making a bad choice, and events spiraling out of their control, and The Asphalt Jungle plays that out beautifully.

Sterling Hayden, Jean Hagen, and Marilyn Monroe give the stand-out performances here, as far as I'm concerned.  Sam Jaffe may have gotten the Oscar nomination for this film, but I think his acting wasn't nearly as interesting as any of theirs.

Sterling Hayden convinces us he's simultaneously a good-natured country boy and a remorseless robber.  Dix is so sweet and kind to Doll when she needs a place to stay -- he gives up his bed and sleeps on the couch, and we never see him made advances to her, even though she would obviously welcome them.  

But Dix also commits robbery repeatedly, stares so menacingly at a witness that he terrifies the man into not identifying him in a police lineup, and is willing to swing a big and practiced fist at anyone who gets in his way.  Yet by the end of the film, he breaks my heart.  I can't help thinking if he could have stayed in Kentucky even after his family lost everything during the Depression, he would have turned out okay.  Now that's a well-rounded performance.

Jean Hagen's character, Doll, is one of the only fairly decent people in the movie.  She's down on her luck, but she's got a job (albeit as a dancer [possibly an exotic one] in a "clip joint," where customers are routinely bilked out of their money), she keeps her promises, and she refuses to accept any of the heist's loot.  Her weakness is Dix, but he's not a vice, just a guy she fell in love with when she should have known better.  Which, I think, is why she is free and alive by the end.  If you've only seen her as brassy Lena Lamont in Singin' in the Rain (1952), you're going to be bowled over by her performance here -- she plays Doll as a sort of hesitant doe tiptoeing her way through the dirt that surrounds her.  She has seen enough of life to be careful and cautious about who she trusts, but can't help thinking the best about people once she does trust them.

As for Marilyn Monroe, her "kept woman" Angela is sweet, childish, enthusiastic, and thoroughly aware of how precarious her position is.  She's constantly adjusting her words and actions to see if they please the people around her just a little more.  We know Emmerich is her sugar daddy, and he's old enough to be her grandfather, but we someone don't blame Angela for this at all.  She's still somehow naive and cute and fresh, and yet we wholly believe she also is contented to be Emmerich's plaything.  Now there is a nuanced character for you, and it's no wonder Monroe got noticed because of this role.

Oh, and this is pretty random, but Emmerich has an employee who is played by Brad Dexter, and (like most people) I mostly know Brad Dexter as Harry in The Magnificent Seven (1960), so it's pretty wild to see him in this in '40s clothes instead of cowboy duds.

Is this movie family friendly?  I'd say it's teen-friendly.  There's some violence, obviously there's a lot of illegal stuff going on, alcohol and tobacco use is pervasive, and there's a suicide that happens off-camera (but we hear the shot).  Emmerich and Angela kiss once or twice, but that's it; Doll and Dix share an apartment for a few days (but appear to not be sharing a bed); and Riedenschneider's talk about yearning for young Mexican girls and leering at teenage girls dancing to Jukebox records is just oblique enough to be icky without being explicit.  This passed the Hays Code, y'all, so all sexual activity is only hinted at, not shown or even talked about directly.  And there's no cussing.

This has been my first contribution to Back in Black: Another Film Noir Blogathon hosted by myself and The Midnite Drive-In this weekend.  I'll be posting an essay on why I love film noir tomorrow.

Here's one last screencap of Sterling Hayden because I didn't have anywhere else to put it.  And that's how you know he really is my new onscreen fascination, lol.

"Angel and the Badman" (2026) -- Initial Thoughts

There's a particular kind of joy I get when watching a western on the big screen.  The wide-open spaces, the horses, the sprawling stories -- they just beg for a big, big screen.

So, I'm really happy I managed to see this latest remake of Angel and the Badman on the big screen.  It was visually lovely when writ large that way.  There were a handful of shots that I wish I could screencap and share with you, because they were absolutely gorgeous.  Sunlight filtering through the walls of a barn.  A beautiful sky reflected in a still pond.  An abandoned mission that captured my interest especially much, even though it's only onscreen a tiny bit here and there.  Very cool set, that one.

I was especially fond of its deliberate color palette -- filming on location in New Mexico gave it a lot of browns and sands and beiges, but also huge blue skies to balance it all.  

And those were the two main colors of the film: brown and blue.  Dirt and sky.  Earthly concerns and heavenly concerns. Quirt Evans (Zachary Levi) gradually leaves the earthy, worldly part of society to join the quiet farming life of Penny (Meg Fraser) and her family.  As he changes, he goes from wearing primarily brown to more and more dark blue.  Penny herself wears a lot of bright and light blue throughout the movie, and the filmmakers like to position her against the blue sky.

I'm going to try REALLY hard NOT to spend this whole post comparing this movie with the 1947 original that starred John Wayne, Gail Russell, and Harry Carey.  I will dig a little into comparisons at the end of the post, though.  Also, although I'm going to be critical of this movie farther down in this post, I do want to say that I very much enjoyed it.  I hope it does well at the box office.  I hope Angel Studios makes more westerns.  I especially hope Zachary Levi makes more westerns, because he was surprisingly well suited to the genre.

In fact, this movie's biggest strength is its cast.  

I've been passingly familiar with Zachary Levi for quite a while now -- mainly from his playing Fandral in two of the Thor movies, plus voicing Flynn Ryder in Tangled (2010).  Now, I am always prepared to like a guy in a cowboy hat riding a horse.  In fact, if you look at my favorite actors, they're all guys who either have made westerns or look like they ought to make westerns.  But I was not prepared for Levi's particular blend of playful and broken to be so, so effective in a western.  His double-takes were my favorite thing in the whole movie.  He absolutely convinced me Quirt Evans was a bad guy who wouldn't mind not being a bad guy anymore, but who wasn't real upset with being on the wrong side of the law either.  His initial motivations seemed to be simply to get what he could, however he could, and hang onto it as long as he could.  Kind of a Man With No Name sort of vibe, but with more humor and less squinting.

Tommy Lee Jones, I've loved since I was 13 and first saw The Fugitive (1993), which has remained a top favorite film of mine ever since.  Jones will one hundred percent elevate any film he's involved in, without fail.  He cannot be boring.  Cranky, cross, bitter, mean, acerbic -- sure, he can and will be any of those.  But boring?  Never.  And he's not boring here, playing semi-patient and fairly inscrutable Marshal McClintock.

Meg Fraser was fine as Penny Worth.  Her grandma Harriet (Melissa Chambers) was an absolute hoot, and would have been my favorite character if not for something dumb the script did toward the end.  

I've seen Neal McDonough in a handful of things -- I probably know him best as the bad guy who takes on Dwayne Johnson in Walking Tall (2004), which I have seen a surprising number of times (or maybe not surprising, lol), and I've seen him in a lot of random things over the years.  I'm pretty fond of him as "Dum Dum" Dugan, one of the Howling Commandos in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011).  I was left wondering if the wolf pelt collar of his coat was a nod to the Sykes family in Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One (2024).  McDonough uses his ice blue eyes to chilling effect as infamous outlaw Laredo in this, but his character remained hard to figure out throughout.  No the actor's fault, I think -- I'm blaming the script.

In fact, I had kind of a lot of issues with the writing.  Which I'm going to vent my spleen about here, and it's going to involve SPOILAGE, so please skip to the picture of Tommy Lee Jones on a horse if you want to avoid SPOILERS.

Okay.  So.  Um.  First of all, instead of the Worth family being Quakers like they are in the 1947 version, they are what my dad called "Little House on the Prairie Christians."  In other words, generic churchgoers who belong to a generic church and are devoted to Judeo-Christian values and platitudes without talking at all about central Christian things like a sinner's need for a savior.  This movie did have a church scene where the pastor mentioned Jesus, so that's a little more actual-Christian than we usually see in this sort of movie.  But making them generic Christians instead of specifically Quakers made the ending falter, and muddied the motivations for the whole Worth family.

Especially at the ending, when the writers caused me to lose all sympathy for and confidence in Penny's mom and grandma.  Grandma Harriet has been a ball of fire through the whole movie.  She's spitting out opinions and making sly little comments and being as full of spit and vinegar as she can... until the ending, when (TOTAL SPOILER) Laredo goes upstairs to rape her granddaughter Penny.  Penny's mom has been pretty strong and capable throughout the film, too.  But when Laredo tells those women if they interfere or make any noise or do anything at all while he is upstairs, he will kill Penny... those two women knuckle under.  If they'd been Quakers, okay, they have a very real and understandable reason to shun violence of every sort.  That would be a little bit believable.  Maybe.  But the way this is, with them being generic Christians?  What happened to all the Bible passages about defending the helpless, for instance?

I'm sorry, but I don't care how scary a bad guy is.  If he tells me to sit still and be quiet while he rapes my child, he will only be doing that over my literally dead body.  And with as many injuries as I can inflict on him in a short period of time -- eye-gouging would probably go a long way to stopping him completely.  As I recall, he didn't even have his gun out when he was threatening them at this point.  Grandma could have thrown her cane at him to distract him while Mom went for his face with her fingernails, if nothing else.  So, I lost all respect for Penny's mom and grandma right there, and it's all the writers' fault.  Laredo could have tied them up.  Knocked them unconscious.  Killed them -- he's shooting people all over the place in the film, so I don't see why he would stop here and now.  Killing them would really be the most sensible thing for him to do.  We all know he's going to do that anyway, eventually.  The route the writers chose is inconsistent for his character, illogical, and a wimpy writing choice.

Speaking of that ending, we gradually see that Laredo has a lot of weird sores and scars and pustules and things all over him, which I guess when tied to his chronic cough and his earlier request for mercury are supposed to point to him having syphilis.  This is just not necessary, y'all.  Make him Consumptive (my assumption for most of the film) and have done with the nasty VD implications.  He's already a horrible character without this, AND they never tie this into ANY part of the plot, so it's not necessary in any way.

Furthermore, having the Worths just be generic Christians means that Quirt does NOT have to make a big decision about whether or not to give up violence.  In the original film, he's not an outlaw who's been running around stealing gold from other outlaws, he's a guy who just got out of prison after serving time involved with avenging his dad's murder and is trying to evade the rest of his dad's killers, who are now after him.  I don't mind them changing Quirt to being an actual outlaw in this movie, but making the Worths not Quakers anymore means they pull the teeth of the central question of the story: can Quirt stop relying on his own violent abilities and start relying on God to take care of him instead?

The showdown in the original revolves around that question.  The showdown in this new version just revolves around "can the bad guy be stopped in time before he ravages Penny and kills her and her family."  Quirt really doesn't have to give anything up, aside from deciding he's okay with being a non-cool farmer type and no longer risking getting shot while stealing gold.  He doesn't get a chance to grow and change much -- his big character arc is going from caring only about himself to also caring about three or four other people.  Not very interesting.  

Also, whyyyyyy did the writers decide it would be a great idea to paint Marshal McClintock and his deputies as less-than-savory characters and imply they're involved in disreputable things?  Can't we have an actually good, upright lawman here?  There's no point to that little piece of storytelling.  It felt mean.  

While we're talking about things that don't make sense, HOW on earth did Laredo kill the doctor and his patient and the guy with the broken tooth, presumably by shooting them, in the middle of town in broad daylight, and nobody noticed for like a whole day?  Guns aren't that quiet!  That town wasn't that loud!  My dudes.  Think these things through.

Okay, that's enough.  I did enjoy watching this movie.  It's possible I'll watch it again, but mainly just for Zachary Levi and Tommy Lee Jones.

Is this movie family friendly?  Uh, no.  Handful of cuss words.  Shooting and bloody wounds, though no graphic gore.  Whores are in several scenes and referred to as such.  The word 'rape' doesn't get used, but is obviously intended by more than one character on more than one occasion.  It's implied that Quirt is used to bedding the sort of women who might enjoy tying a man to a bedframe.  

While this wasn't bad, I definitely recommend the 1947 version.  It makes sense, it's family friendly, and it's really fun.  The Paramount YouTube channel provides this excellent print for free viewing.

I think I'll watch it with my teens after supper tonight :-D