Western Union [VHS]

Western Union [VHS]
by Fritz Lang

Western Union [VHS]

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Product details

Actor: Dean Jagger, John Carradine, Randolph Scott, Robert Young, Virginia Gilmore
Director: Fritz Lang
Producer: Darryl F. Zanuck
Producer: Harry Joe Brown
Writer: George Bruce
Writer: Horace McCoy
Writer: Jack Andrews
Writer: Robert Carson
Writer: Zane Grey
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
Running Time: 95 minutes
Release Date: 1989-11-22
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: 20th Century Fox
Studio: 20th Century Fox

VHS Movie Reviews of Western Union [VHS]

Movie Review: Hawksian male bonding meets Langian determinism in a Technicolor Western masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars

Lang does Hawks as well as Hawks does in the first part of this extraordinary Western, before settling down into typical deterministic, dark and guilt-haunted fatalism for the dark finale.

This is one of those films that shows its greatness almost instantly but at the same time very subtly. Vance Shaw (Randolph Scott) is on horseback and being pursued, we know not why -- he stumbles on wounded Edward Creighton (Dean Jagger) and decides to take his gun and horse, but discovering that Creighton is in a bad way, decides to fix him up first. This is conveyed mostly through facial expressions and very brief, clipped dialog - in 2 minutes we know that Shaw is an outlaw, but basically a good guy. Shaw ends up helping Creighton on his way to civilization, then disappears.

Cut to a few weeks or months later, with Creighton on the mend and in charge of an expedition to lay telegraph wire going west from Omaha. He hires Shaw as a scout, who tries to leave when he finds out that Creighton is in charge; but Creighton wants him anyway, repaying a debt and sensing something quality. Also hired is a tenderfoot, son of a benefactor of the project, but atypically the Easterner Richard Blake (Robert Young) is quite competent as he shows right away in an amusing but exciting bronco-busting sequence. Both of the hires vie for Creighton's sister Sue (Virginia Gilmore) who - again not typically - seems quite as able to take care of herself as any man. The camaraderie between the three men, the comedic elements involving an unwilling cook and various rough and tumble types, and the wonderfully played light romantic elements dominate the first third of the film and reminded me more of Howard Hawks' "Red River" or "Only Angels Have Wings" than most Lang - but they are so well played and the action progresses so naturally that it doesn't matter, and doesn't alter our pleasure - if it does perhaps change our expectations - as the more usual Langian themes of the haunted past, dark secrets and the immense pull of the easier, destructive and evil ways come to dominate the later part of the film. Shaw's old pals come back to haunt him as the the wagon train and its wires move westward; attacks mount on the crew, and Shaw has to wrestle with what, if anything, he is to tell Creighton about his tortured relationship with Jack Slade (Barton MacLane), leader of the outlaws.

Beautifully shot in early Technicolor and moving fairly seamlessly from sound stages to western locations, this is for my money easily Lang's best western and one of his very best films, conveying as potently as any of his films the tragic inability of men to escape their pasts and build a new future. Scott is as good as I've seen him, showing more with a flick of an eye than a lot of actors can do in a paragraph of dialog, and the rest of the cast is uniformly fine. The inevitable showdown between Shaw's past criminal life and his potential future is extraordinary, and a surprise even for a longtime Lang devotee such as myself; and even in 1941 it seems there was no place more fraught with meaning on the margins of civilization than the barbershop and the dusty street outside. You can get a shave, you can feel like a new man, but you can't really ever be one as long as the old ties are still holding you back.

My old VHS is perfectly serviceable, but this badly needs an official, quality DVD release - easily one of the best westerns of the 1940s, if not of the American cinema as a whole.

Movie Review: Telegraph History Movie (Western Union)
Summary: 5 Stars

A must buy for all history buffs especially telegraph buffs! I'm elated to have a copy of Western Union in my movie collection. The movie is about how Western Union set up telegraph poles across the United States to the west coast. Showing all the struggle, killing of people, all in the effort to set up communications across the nation. At the end of the movie it showed how wonderful it was to have communications from east to west. This was the beginning of what was later to become telephone communications!

[...]

Movie Review: Randolph Scott wrestles with fate in this Fritz Lang western
Summary: 4 Stars

It might seem strange that Fritz Lang would make a western, since his forte was clearly the crime film, but then you remember that his first American film, "Fury," was about a lynching and you realize that the Old West has long been an ideal location for playing out the major themes of the American identity. "Western Union" is the story of the first trans-continental telegraph line being strung across the west, which represents the director's interest in modern technology, although clearly this is retrospective in the same way that "Metropolis" was futuristic. Vance Shaw (Randolph Scott) is fleeing a posse and when his goes lame he ends up with Edward Creighton (Dean Jagger), a telegraph engineer who hires the outlaw as a scout. Richard Blake (Robert Young) is a surveyor who arrives from the east and takes a spark to Sue Creighton (Virginia Gilmore), the sister of Edward, which sets up the film's love triangle. Meanwhile, Confederate raiders led by Jack Slade (Barton MacLane) are stealing cattle and disrupting the building of the telegraph line. Shaw is caught in the middle of this as well because he has a relationship with Slade.

Because this is a Fritz Lang film "Western Union" does not play out the way you think in terms of who gets the girl and who kills who in the big gunfight at the end. Shaw is trying to reform and his efforts are contrasted with those of the raiders, who call themselves Confederates but are clearly more interested in profiting from their actions. Shaw was one of Quantrill's raiders and we understand that was a legitimate guerilla group unlike the one headed by Slade. Despite being handicapped because he has come from the East and likes to wear nice clothes, the character of Blake emerges as a hero as well (we can tell because he starts dressing like a cowboy), which is certainly something of a surprise. For that matter, Sue Creighton is more than widow dressing in the film, because she is also a telegraph operator and is as excited about the building of the telegraph as anyone. Still, the big picture of the telegraph becomes secondary to Shaw's personal struggle.

This was Lang's second color film and the director takes advantage of the setting to offer up some great shots of the beautiful landscapes filmed by Edward Cronjager. The flaw in "Western Union" are the comic episodes, which really cut against the grain of the film. You have Chill Willis as Homer Kettle and Slim Summerville as Cookie (the cook) who is always scared witless by the Wild West, providing the unnecessary comic relief and John Carradine bringing his distinctive touch to the role of Doc Murdoch. This is one of Scott's better roles and better performances, and given the stakes involved from his perspective the humor is at least misplaced if not forced. Jagger was always a solid character actor and even Young manages to do something with the strictures of his character.

"Western Union" was Lang's second Western, the first being "The Return of Frank James," which better fits the traditional Lang mold. You cannot tell the story of how the "singing wire" was strung from Omaha to Salt Lake City and just focus on the technological accomplishment so the dilemmas faced by Shaw become the real driving force of the narrative. The 1941 film was a personal favorite of Lang's and the director took pride in photographing Native Americans wearing accurate warpaint and battle gear. Lang made one more western, "Rancho Notorious," and if there is a clear commonality to this trio of westerns made by a master director who immigrated from Germany, it would be the theme of a man ruled by fate. However, in "Western Union" it would seem that fate wins. Final Note: I have never managed to spot him, but Jay Silverheels (a.k.a. Tonto from "The Lone Ranger") is an uncredited extra in this film.

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Summary of Western Union [VHS]

Western Union is nominally one of those epic celebrations of great pioneer achievements, and its official heroes are an Eastern-bred, Harvard-trained engineer named Blake (Robert Young) and a visionary named Creighton (Dean Jagger), who dreams of a transcontinental telegraph system to unite a divided nation in the first year of the Civil War. But the film really belongs to Randolph Scott's Vance Shaw, a reformed outlaw trying to make good as a member of the team stringing "the singing wire" across the plains. His past--which Creighton knows something of--keeps reaching out for him, so that the brightly colored fable of westward progress is almost eclipsed by the darker, personal drama of embattled character and divided loyalties.

Although this theme faintly recalls director Fritz Lang's towering 1937 fable of injustice, You Only Live Once, we shouldn't make too much of the affinity. Western Union was merely a studio assignment, and Lang--a passionate explorer and student of the American West--mostly concentrated on serving up lashings of period detail and atmosphere and devising spectacular set pieces. The latter include a mini-g?tterd?mmerung of a forest fire, two strikingly composed encounters with Indians, and a climactic barbershop shootout that's studded with Lang "touches." The scenery is magnificent (albeit a mite mountainous for Nebraska!), the Technicolor blazes as Technicolor should, and the costuming and art direction are so evocative that the German ?migr? proudly received a commendation from an old timers' association praising the accuracy of his frontier re-creation. --Richard T. Jameson

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