"Tribute to a Bad Man" (1956)

It's Vic Morrow's birthday today :-D  To celebrate, I'm reviewing one of his earliest movies, Tribute to a Bad Man (1956).  Although Vic's role here is fairly small, it's quite pivotal.

The whole movie is an exploration of "what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his own soul? (Mark 8:36, NKJV)  I am peculiarly drawn to stories that explore that theme, for some reason.  Or maybe I'm drawn to storytellers who like that theme?  It definitely comes up over and over in movies and books that I enjoy.

Jeremy Rodock (James Cagney) has built himself a horse empire in Colorado.  He owns a whole valley, he's raised hundreds and hundreds of horses, and he's dedicated himself to keeping and protecting what is his.  If anyone tries to steal even one of his horses, Rodock strings them up to the nearest tree.  He goes into a kind of frenzy at the mere mention of horse rustlers.  These are his horses, and he's going to protect them however he has to, since there's no law closer than two hundred miles away.

Of course, in the actual Old West, horse theft was a crime that carried the death penalty.  With good reason.  If you stole a person's horse and left them on foot, in a lot of places out in the West, you were condemning them to a pretty cruel death.  And, with lawmen scattered very widely, and judges even more so, people did often have to kill to protect their horses and themselves.  In fact, nobody in this movie really questions Rodock's lawful right to hang horse thieves.

What they do question is what happens inside to a person who repeatedly hunts down and hangs (or shoots) people with no authority beyond his own determination.  Jeremy Rodock is a hard, anxious, lonely man for most of the film.  He was ranching partners with a guy named Peterson (James Bell) at one point, but broke up their partnership because Peterson was "too soft."  Rodock does have the companionship of a Greek woman named Jocasta (Irene Papas) who lives in his house because he offered her shelter when she needed it, but he always tells her she is free to come and go as she pleases, that he has no claim on her.  He also has a handful of wranglers working for him to help care for his herds of horses and so on, but they are only hired hands, not friends. 

Jocasta has fallen in love with Rodock, and she tries and tries to help him see how he's hollowing himself out with his fierce insistence on killing anyone who tries to steal his horses.  But he won't listen.  He's convinced this is what he has to do to protect what is his, and that his horses and his valley are more important than anything else.  Even himself.

Into this unhappy world rides a young man from Pennsylvania, Steve Miller (Don Dubbins).  All Steve wants is to be a cowboy, but he settles for horse wrangler when offered a job by Rodock.  Steve is immediately smitten with Jocasta, and Rodock's casual treatment of her upsets Steve, since he assumes she is a "kept woman" and doesn't really understand that what's keeping Jocasta at that ranch is her love for Rodock, not Rodock's desire or command.

Of course, some men soon try to steal a lot of Rodock's horses.  Unhappily, they're aided by his former partner, Peterson.  Peterson's resentful son Lars (Vic Morrow) blames Rodock's uncompromising behavior toward his father years ago for making their family poor.  Peterson winds up dead after an altercation between the horse thieves and Rodock's men, and Lars vows to get even.

Lars joins up with a disgruntled former employee of Rodock's and some random bad guys steal a whole herd of Rodock's brood mares and their colts.  Over Lars's protests, the other bad guys cripple the mares so they can't run back to their home range on Rodock's land.  

When Rodock finds them, he is irate over how they have tortured those horses -- and I completely sympathize with him there.  It's one thing to steal a horse, but to purposely maim it is a whole other level of evil.  

Lars doesn't plead for mercy.  He'll take whatever punishment Rodock metes out because he chose to help steal those horses.  You get the feeling he might be grieving so hard for his father that he might actually be subconsciously trying to commit suicide-by-rustling.

Steve Miller begs Rodock not to hang these men, but to take them to the fort two hundred miles away to face a judge for their crimes.  And Rodock decides that's just what he'll do, but with a little immediate punishment added in:  he makes Lars and the other two rustlers take off their boots and forces them to walk over the barren, hot, unforgiving Colorado land toward that fort.

If you need an actor to wordlessly convey deep physical suffering coupled with defiant resentment, Vic Morrow is your guy.  He exudes agony with every step of his unshod feet, stumbling and drifting from side to side.  Yet, at the same time, he retains a sort of petulant swagger, both with his body and face and with his sneering voice.  If Rodock is going to force Lars to walk bootless to face a judge, then Lars is going to stomp every single step of the way as if it's his own idea.  So there. 

Lars spurns help and scorns offers of mercy.  He keeps walking even after the other two men have collapsed and been loaded onto spare horses for the rest of the journey.  And his dedication to defying Rodock starts to remind Rodock of... himself.  He sees in this angry, stubborn, even petulant boy a mirror image of how he's been behaving for far too many years.

That realization is pivotal for the character and the film.  If you had cast anyone but Vic Morrow as Lars, I think the character would have come off like an an angry two-year-old being marched upstairs to take a bath.  But he somehow blends anguished sorrow over his father's death, defiant rage at this forced march, and withering pain until you just can't help but admire Lars.  And all of that with a very, very few lines of dialog.  It's no wonder Vic Morrow's star was rising -- this is only his second on-screen appearance, following Blackboard Jungle (1955), but he steals scenes from James Cagney with ease.  Repeatedly.  Of course, he'd been acting on stage for a while, which helped, I'm sure.

Anyway, everything ends well.  Lars doesn't even die, which is kind of a rarity for Vic's pre-Combat! roles.  Jeremy Rodock realizes he loves Jocasta, accepts her love, and sets off to start a new and different life together with her.  Love conquers all!  Even stubborn and angry hearts.

Is this movie family friendly?  Yeah.  The guys in the bunkhouse do obviously assume that Rodock an Jocasta are intimate, but you only see them kiss a couple times, and she has her own bedroom.  One of the wranglers talks about wanting a new mail order catalog because he hears they have pictures of women in corsets in them now.  The crippling of the horses might be hard on sensitive younger viewers, though.  There's a lynching, but the hanged man's head and torso are out of sight, you just see his dangling legs.  There are a couple of gunfights that result in deaths.  But it's all the very clean and almost bloodless kind of 1950s gunplay where everything is implied, not rubbed in your face.  There's no cussing that I recall.

I've tried to show off some of the gorgeous scenery this movie showcases.  It was largely shot outdoors in Colorado, and there's a majestic breadth to the landscape that sometimes almost overwhelms the characters.