The Virginian (1946)

The Virginian (1946)

Directed by Stuart Gilmore

Screenplay by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, adapted by Howard Estabrook from the novel by Owen Wister

Runtime: 1 hr, 27 min

I will always hesitate to call something in the creative field “inept”, because in almost every field imaginable I don’t have any expertise from which to speak.  What I may perceive as a gross mistake may in fact be a conscious artistic choice that I am simply not seeing.  There are times, however, that I feel confident in going out on a limb and question the skill set of the creative team.  The Virginian, starring Joel McCrea in the title role, is that sort of movie, the sort of film that makes me wonder whether the writers understood plotting.

Based on a Western novel by Owen Wister, the film finds a young Vermont schoolteacher named Molly Wood (Barbara Britton) moving to Medicine Bow, Wyoming for a teaching job.  She is at first smitten with the ever drifting Steve Andrews (Sonny Tufts) and is not at all fond of the Virginian, and yes, that’s what he goes by.  Meanwhile, the town is up in arms regarding a string of cattle thefts lead by the man-in-black, Trampas (Brian Dunleavy).  It’s up to the Virginian to set things right and win the girl, and all in ninety minutes.

A great deal of this film’s issues can be traced back to its plot structure.  There’s obviously nothing unusual about balancing a good vs. evil story with a romance, but the good stories actually balance the two.  The Virginian does not do this.  Rather, it completely drops one of the two plotlines in favor of the other.  In fact, during an extended sequence of chasing the rustlers, I genuinely started to think that Molly’s coming to town was simply a plot device to get the story going.  What happens is that the audience gets a meandering story.

Now, I’ve not read Wister’s novel, so it may be the case that the original story was meandering and that the screenwriters were simply being faithful to the source material.  All the same, something about this plot needs tightening up; scenes can be cut right from the movie without altering a thing.  That’s ultimately what bothers me about this movie: the film offers setups for potentially interesting conflicts, but it rarely offers up any payoffs.  It’s as if the writers were making the story up as they went and only occasionally remembered what they’d wrote before.

For one illustrative example, let’s take the opening sequence of the film.  We see Molly getting on a coach from Bennington to get to the train station.  She is told not to let those Westerners monopolize the ruggedness card, and her beau (Bill Edwards) asks her to stay in Vermont.  Right away, there are two possible avenues for conflict: the whole East vs. West angle and the affections of the boy back home.  The former gets one conversation towards the end; the latter is mentioned in passing.  If that entire introduction was spliced out, no one would know the difference.

Even when the conflicts are in fact followed up on, they resolutions are usually unsatisfying.  By far the worst offender in this department is the romance between Molly and the Virginian.  The Virginian immediately takes a liking to her, but Molly finds him repulsive.  Then, essentially out of nowhere, Molly warms up to him.  It just sort of happens.  From what I can tell, it’s because the Virginian was fond of the horse that the judge gave her.  What happened to the belligerence?  Until the moment they’re a thing, they’ve got the chemistry of a beanbag chair and a dehumidifier.

Still, I could forgive some plotting faults if the characters were interesting.  They are not.  McCrea brings almost no personality to the Virginian—he’s the good guy, and that’s about it.  Trampas does get some interesting lines in, usually advice from his “sainted mother”, but his motives are standard “get rich” scheming.  The only one who is mildly intriguing is Steve Andrews: an old friend of the Virginian’s, now hanging around with Trampas’ gang.  There’s possible pay-off there, but as we’ve established, the resolution is not at all engaging.

In fact, the only engaging parts of The Virginian are its action sequences.  It is kind of fun watching Trampas and company cause a cattle stampede and seeing them runoff in fear.  And despite the lack of audience investment in it, the inevitable showdown between the Virginian and Trampas is pretty well staged—though it must be said that how it ends is, you guessed it, unsatisfying.  Let’s just say a scared horse gives away someone’s location.  Even when the film is fun to look at, there’s a lot to be desired.

Truth be told, I don’t hate this movie.  For all its numerous faults, it’s not an offensively bad movie.  It’s just not a very well made.  Had they cut the dead weight from the story and given the characters a rewrite, The Virginian might have been an enjoyable little Western—certainly no masterpiece, but at least an entertaining diversion.  As it stands, though, the film just leaves me scratching my head as to exactly what went wrong and who is ultimately to blame.  I could spend all day thinking on that, but it probably wouldn’t pay-off very well.