3:10 to Yuma
dir. James Mangold
2007

"The Beast is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us."
- Father Merrin, The Exorcist

"If they move, shoot 'em!"
- Pike Bishop, The Wild Bunch

"Always do the right thing."
"I got it, I'm gone."
- The Mayor and Mookie, Do The Right Thing

Ben Wade is a bad man. He and his gang rob stagecoaches, burn towns, kill innocent people and generally make life hard for the honest, law-abiding citizens of the godforsaken Old West.

Dan Evans is a good man. He's honest, hard-working and plays by the rules. He loves his wife and family. He's in way over his head.

When Ben Wade is captured after robbing his 21st coach in apparently as many weeks, the Pinkertons hire Evans to literally ride shotgun, escorting Wade to the Contention train station where he will board the eponymous 3:10 train to Yuma.

Evans takes the job because he needs the money. He does the job because it needs doing.

For his part, Wade has two cards to play. First, and most obviously, is his gang. In hot pursuit under the leadership of the psychopathic Charlie Prince, the Wade Gang rides to the rescue.

But, as Wade himself explains, he likes to do things easy. Comfortable though he is with killing, he'd just as soon bribe his way out of the situation.

He easily identifies Evans as both the moral pillar and the moral weak point of the deputy crew. The others, railroad men, bank men, Pinkertons, are inherently corrupt or easily corruptible. Those that can't be bribed can easily be threatened. They're just doing their jobs and their jobs are only worth so much.

Evans, on the other hand, is a man of honor. Once he takes the job, he's honor bound to see it through. But Evans has problems. Lots of problems. The railroad is coming to his town. There are two kinds of people in railroad towns: the rich and the screwed. Two guesses as to which category Evans falls into.

As they travel to the station and await the train, Wade tears into Evans like Hannibal Lecter into a lamb chop. How could a good man allow his family to suffer under such poverty? Let me take you to this mountaintop...all these kingdoms can be yours.

As the story moves toward its climax, the distinctions between the men become at once clearer and more fuzzy. Is Wade truly a bad, bad man? Or is he merely a good survivor who won't let his "family" perish at the hands of the ruthless "legitimate" businessmen of the Old West? Is Evans truly a good, good man? Or has he seen that the righteous path, in this case, just happens to be the most profitable?

Oh, well, never mind. Here comes Charlie Prince with his FABULOUS little six guns and, oh, he just killed seven guys. Okay, ethics colloquium officially over!

3:10 to Yuma is a western in the tradition of The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven, which is to say a post-modern counter-myth to the traditional westerns like Stagecoach or the hyper-cynical spaghetti westerns like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

The centerpiece of this tradition is moral ambiguity.

The white hat vs. black hat morality of the traditional western was a reflection of the public morality of the day. We wanted to believe that we were right and they were wrong because we were Americans and they are not and we earned our moral superiority by the steely-eyed, straight talking virtue of our white hat forbears.

That's what made the original film version of 3:10 so compelling and creepy: it cast against type. The satanic Ben Wade is played by white hat replicant Glenn Ford and the heroic Dan Evans is played by a twitchy, rat-faced Van Heflin.

By contrast, the hyper-cynicism of Sergio Leone presents an amoral universe. Instead of white hats vs. black hats, we have utterly self-interested characters ruthlessly pursuing their, well, self-interests. This is fun, but it reduces the opportunities for nuanced character development.

In The Wild Bunch, Unforgiven and now 3:10 to Yuma, we are given a much richer, more realistic view of our characters. They are concerned not only with what they are doing, but why they are doing it. They thread the needle between reason and rationalization, between choices and habits, between self-image and self-determination. Above all, they want to be examples of something. Something which they can't quite define.

And, for once, we get all this in a good, old-fashioned, action-packed adventure story. For all the subtlety of character interplay, 3:10 never falls into being ponderous or pretentious.

Mangold moves the camera with a "you are there" intensity, tracing the eye across critical elements in the scene with all the sensitive attention of an Apache tracker.

And, as good as the two principles are (and they are very good), the real nod here goes to Ben Foster as Charlie Prince, 2007 recipient of the Heath Ledger Award for Best Gay Cowboy.

Prince is a pure, snarling black hat who owns every scene he's in. More caricature than character, he provides the narrative clarity needed to allow Russell Crowe and Christian Bale to explore all that nuance without turning the film into My Dinner With Andre and His Rifle.

But the iconography of Prince's performance is as subtle as the rest of the movie's interplay. On the one hand, we have a clearly gay character whose authority and competence is unquestioned among the "real" men he leads. On the other hand, he is psychopathic and morally corrupt, moreso...much moreso...even than Ben Wade.

The suggestion that his sexuality is part and parcel of this corruption hails back to the days of the celluloid closet, when coded homosexual references were used both as sly winks to the underground gay culture and sly warnings to the aboveground straight culture.

My one complaint with the film is that it is a bit of a sausage festival. Gretchen Moll does what she can with the somewhat thankless role of Dan Evans' wife, but you will go long stretches in this piece without seeing an unbearded face.

Three and a half stars. Jason Wade sez, they're gonna hang me...in the mornin'...never gonna see the sun.