The Maverick Queen

The best, worth seeing, in this film is Barbara Stanwyck, she is by far the best actress in the entire cast. Everyone else, including Barry Sullivan, Scott Brady, Mary Murphy, etc., is good, but only functional around her. I try to imagine what it would have been like if Barbara Stanwyck had worked with Sergio Leone.

When Barbara Stanwyck's era of Hollywood superstardom came to an abrupt end in the early fifties, she refused to quit and became the star of a number of feminist westerns which cast her as a tough yet sensuous aging woman in tight pants and a cowboy hat, oftentimes the leader of an outlaw gang. She'd make one minor classic of this variety, Forty Guns for Sam Fuller. The Maverick Queen has a bigger budget (and was shot in color) but lacks the energy and magnetism of that later film - both, however, co-star he with Barry Sullivan, a highly underrated leading man who enjoyed far greater success on TV (including a two year stint as Pat Garrett on The Tall Man) than in the movies. Babs struts around in tight pants and we're not supposed to notice that she could easily pass for her boyfriend's mother. And as the badguy, her former boyfriend the Sundance Kid, there's Scott Brady - who played The Dancing Kid in JOHNNY GUITAR, the very best of the odd westerns that cast visibly aging former big name female stars in cowgirl roles. (Joan Crawford, in that film's case). This is handsomely produced by strictly minor stuff. We're supposed to cry when Babs "gets it" in the end, but I can still recall kids in the Rialto theatre in Patchogue, Long Island laughing out loud at the end way back when.

Perhaps the first thing to note about this film is that the Maverick Queen herself, Kit Banion - cattle trader, saloon proprietor, hand in glove with Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, and the richest woman in Rock Springs - doesn't actually appear until ten to fifteen minutes into the action! Even then, we initially assume she must be a minor character; surely the lady of the title song must be Lucy Lee - sweeter, younger and far less hard-faced - the girl the hero has already rescued in the first scenes? (Mary Murphy, just two years into her career, as opposed to Barbara Stanwyck, at this point a full twenty-five years into - and almost at the end of - hers.)

But Kit soon takes charge of the situation; and she can look after herself. There is a scene which cleverly subverts the audience's expectations, in which she is attacked and her lover rides to the rescue - only, before he can arrive, she saves the situation single-handed by deliberately sending her opponent over a cliff. When her would-be saviours arrive, they find her already bruised but triumphant. And in the final gun-battle, it is she who takes an active part when her lover is wounded, forcing him to keep moving, shooting without hesitation to protect him and taking a bullet in his defence.

The outlaw gang in this film are not the usual brutal but dim-witted cannon fodder provided for the hero's benefit, either. As it turns out, they've spotted the plot twist long before the audience (or before me at least!) When the fugitives hole up in a cabin, the pursuers actually take advantage of their superior numbers to surround the cabin and force their way in - and later on, instead of obligingly shooting it out, they simply set fire to the building in order to smoke out their quarry. The hero's ruse to lead them off fools them for a while - but as soon as they see through it, they jump to the right conclusion and head back in time to foil the planned escape.

The casual amorality of the outlaws is also well depicted. Sundance's disappearance after he gets the worse of a struggle with Kit is greeted by Cassidy with no more than "Well, I guess he deserved it", and his subsequent return is accepted with an equal shrug: "Thought you were dead, but I'm glad you ain't." There is no question, for example, of the rest of the outlaws hesitating for a moment to attack when they ride up just because Kit happens to have two of their number held at gunpoint.

My main problem with this film is that none of the principal characters seem to have any real motivation for what they are doing. Jeff at least has a plot rationale for his inconsistent actions - and for why we never see beyond his surface - but neither Kit nor Sundance seem to have sufficient justification for acting clean against their own best interests. In both cases, they are presumably intended to be in the grip of an overwhelming and unreciprocated affection - but Sundance spends the entire film chasing Lucy Lee rather than the woman who has supposedly prompted him to wild jealousy, and the Maverick Queen also displays an unjustified and distinctly surprising concern towards her. After all, not only did we see Kit cold-bloodedly engineering this same girl's bankruptcy for her own profit earlier in the film, but she also has to know by this stage that Lucy is her rival for Jeff's affections!

But whether due to bad acting or a poor script, Kit doesn't really give the impression in any case of having fallen passionately enough for Jeff to make it plausible that she should give up everything for him. Kit Banion is no lovable rogue with a heart of gold; she is depicted as a ruthless and hard-headed businesswoman - albeit with a slightly unusual turn of trade - who is deliberately toying with a young newcomer in order to pay out the lover of whom she has tired. At some point this is presumably supposed to betray her into genuine affection, but for all the kissing in evidence, it somehow fails to convince - particularly when faced with Jeff's lack of response.

Lucy too remains something of a cipher. Her early appearance, when we naturally assume she is the title character, leads us to expect that she is going to have a much larger role than ultimately transpires, but in fact, that initial scene more or less sums up her entire function - to act as a (repeated) plot device so that Sundance's pursuit of her can allow Jeff to get the better of him, and to provide the token 'good woman' required as the hero's love interest. There is no convincing relationship of any kind established between her and Jeff, any more than there is between Jeff and Kit - or Kit and Sundance.

All these characters come across as masks, without little or nothing real going on behind their faces. There is quite an intelligent plot going on in the background, but I simply couldn't find it in me to care very much about what happened to any of them. That lack of engagement on the part of the audience is, I think, the fatal flaw in this film.

I gather it is a Zane Grey adaptation. The virtues of the plot - such as they are - are owed entirely, I would guess, to the source novel. Any essence of the original characters would seem to have got lost in the translation from page to screen. Given its intelligently-drawn villains, morally ambiguous title character and cleverly set-up twist, the material might have made even a great off-beat Western...I'm afraid, however, that this isn't it.

Barry Sullivan is a Pinkerton agent. He's sent to gather information on the Hole In The Wall Gang. Barbara Stanwyck, who fronts for them and is Scott Brady's lover -- he plays the Sundance Kid -- falls in love with Sullivan. There's also a subplot about Mary Murphy, whose cattle keep getting rustled.

It's hard for me to judge this movie, because I saw it with the visuals wrecked. Released by Republic at a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, I saw it in TV-standard pan-and-scan, wrecking cinematographer Jack Marta's compositions and reducing every shot to an undistinguished series of close-ups and medium close-ups. The story is one of those A Westerns from the 1950s, meant to star a woman or two in trousers, but with the action carried by the men. I'm pretty sure that if you got to see it at its proper aspect ratio, you'd like it a lot. The way I saw it, though, reduces it to mush.

The Maverick Queen (1956)

Well Barbara Stanwyck made a lot of Westerns in the 1950s, and most of them are routine stuff, and in them she has often limited if still central roles. This is a great example. She's in the film much less than her co-stars, and the story is a patched together set of common problems--the cattle rancher faces trouble from the cattle rustlers and a hero has come to town, and a little love is going to cross the frontier.

The key difference in all these movies is that Stanwyck plays a strong, sometimes very very strong, woman. That alone makes them watchable. But don't expect "The Maverick Queen" to hold up critically or even hold your attention fully. The plot even has so many little confusions, on purpose. you have to pay close attention (and show some patience) to keep in on track.

For one example, without giving too much away, the main man, played well by Barry Sullivan, is new in town, and he says he's Jeff Younger, a famous gunslinger. This suite Stanwyck's character perfectly--she runs the tavern but also the general racketeering schemes for the province. But then another man arrives in town and says he's Jeff Younger. Hmmm. Along the same lines, the pretty young girl in town is another strong woman, clearly a good one, and her sidekick is a lazy loaf but a good guy, until you see him start telling people things he shouldn't. And so on. These are really great plot twists but they aren't handled with total clarity or given the impact you might expect so the movie totters a bit.

The director, it might be noted, is Joseph Kane, who pretty much only did Westerns, over a hundred of them, and he probably didn't distinguish one from another very well. He's not even trying to create a masterpiece on the small budget this small studio gave him. (It's a full color Republic Pictures production, and there are corners cut.)

The one other interesting side note is the presence of Sundance as a major character (and Butch Cassidy as a very minor one). Of course, history is thrown to the wind on what happens to Sundance, so never mind that . (Watch the Newman/Redford one for the classic outline.)

And Stanwyck? She's strong, and I mean physically tough, and she busts out with good acting in a few scenes. But she, too, seems to realize she's doing routine stuff.

A final note--I saw this on TCM, and for the first time in twenty years of watching movies there I saw one that was not shown full screen. Yes. A shame. It's a wide wide screen enterprise and it uses an unusual system called Naturama, and it was the first Republic movie to use it. It was really just a compatible anamorphic widescreen system like Panavision, but for some reason it was cropped (given the awful "pan and scan" treatment) for this release. That didn't help with the fluidity of the filming, or the appreciation of the big landscape of Colorado so proudly announced in the opening credits.

Should you see this? Not really. There are better Stanwyck Westerns, and better Westerns. And better movies.