Devils Doorway [DVD] [1950] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) presents "DEVIL'S DOORWAY" (1950) (84 min/B&W) (Fully Restored/Dolby Digitally Remastered) -- Starring Robert Taylor, Louis Calhern, Paula Raymond, Marshall Thompson & Edgar Buchanan

Directed by Anthony Mann

Lance Poole (RobertTaylor cast against type) is a Native American who returns to his people's land after the Civil War and discovers that they are being victimized and persecuted - thanks to machinations of crooked lawyer Verne Coolan (Louis Calhern). Unable to turn to the Law to protect his tribesmen, Lance becomes what white men call a "renegade."

The cinematography is nothing short of spectacular, sometimes even haunting; certain outdoor scenes are as memorable as masterpiece landscape paintings (and we're talking black & white here!) -- something to behold.

Devil's Doorway was the vanguard of a new western cycle of the early 1950s, wherein the Native Americans were the good guys and the white man the villains. Anthony Mann was at his best on westerns with a dark side and here he shows us the talent that would be responsible for so many great films that were yet to come.

BIOS:
1. Anthony Mann [aka: Emil Anton Bundesmann] - [Director]
Date of Birth: 30 June 1906 - San Diego, California
Date of Death: 29 April 1967 - Berlin, Germany

2. Robert Taylor [aka: Spangler Arlington Brugh]
Date of Birth: 5 August 1911 - Filley, Nebraska
Date of Death: 8 June 1969 - Santa Monica, California

Mr. Jim's Ratings:
Quality of Picture & Sound: 5 Stars
Performance: 5 Stars
Story & Screenplay: 5 Stars
Overall: 5 Stars [Original Music, Cinematography & Film Editing]

Total Time: 84 min on DVD ~ Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ~ (09/14/2010)

Devil's Doorway is directed by Anthony Mann. It stars Robert Taylor as Lance Poole, a Shoshone Indian who returns home to Medicine-Bow from the American Civil War after a three year stint, and a veteran of three major conflicts. Awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor he rightfully expects to be able to retire to a peaceful life back on the family land. However, all his hopes and dreams are shattered by bigotry and greed as new laws are ushered in to deprive the Native Indians land rights.

Biting and cutting, Devil's Doorway is a Civil Rights Western that, boldly for its time, looks at the injustices done to Native Americans. Very much grim in texture, it's no surprise to see Anthony Mann at the helm for this material. Mann of course would go on to become a Western genre darling for his run of "Adult Westerns" he would do with James Stewart. Prior to this Mann had showed himself to have a keen eye for tough pieces with dark themes in a few well regarded film noir movies. So this was right up his street, in fact a glance at his output shows him to be something of a master when it comes to showing minority groups sympathetically. MGM were nervous tho, unsure as if taking the Western in this direction was the way to go, they pulled it from release in 1949. But after the impact that Delmer Daves' similar themed Broken Arrow made the following year, they ushered it out and the film promptly got lost amongst the plaudits for the James Stewart starrer. That's a shame because this is fit to sit alongside the best work Mann has done.

Filmed in black & white, the film has beautiful landscapes that belie the bleak road the movie ultimately turns down. Shot on location at Aspen and Grand Junction in Colorado (the talented John Alton on cinematography), the film also manages to rise above its obvious eyebrow raising piece of casting. Robert Taylor always had his critics, hell I'm sometimes one of them, but here as he is cast against type as a Shoshone Indian, he gives the character conviction and a stoic nobility that really makes it work. Some of his scenes with the beautiful Paula Raymond (playing his lawyer Orrie Masters) are a lesson in maximum impact garnered from emotional restraint. You will be aware of the fluctuating skin pigmentation he has throughout the movie, but honestly look into his eyes and feel the confliction and loyalty and you really will not care.

Scripted by Guy Trosper (Birdman of Alcatraz), the screenplay is unflinching in showing how badly the Native Americans were treated. Throw that in with Alton's other gift, that of the dusty barren land shot, and you got a very film noir feel to the movie. Something which not only is unique, but something that also showed a shift in the Hollywood Oater. We now get brains to match the action and aesthetics of the Western movie. Not that this is found wanting for action, Mann doesn't short change here either, with a dynamite led offensive purely adrenalin pumping.

A fine fine movie, an important movie in fact. One that is in desperate need of more exposure. Still awaiting a widespread home format disc release, I quote Orrie Masters from the movie..."It would be too bad if we ever forget".... that applies to both the theme of the piece and the actual movie itself. 9/10

"Where are the rest of you?"
"We're all gone."

Only available in the US in a manufactured on demand DVD-R, Devil's Doorway is easily the least seen of all of Anthony Mann's Westerns - not surprisingly, since it's also the darkest by far, the extraordinary The Naked Spur included. All the hallmarks of his later classics are there, but without any commercial compromise. In most of Mann's westerns, the hero is redeemed kicking and screaming in spite of himself. In Devil's Doorway alone it is not the hero who is in need of redemption, but the country, an idea he wouldn't return to until 1964's The Fall of the Roman Empire. You know that there is no way this one is going to have a happy ending: against all expectations for major studio fare of its day, it doesn't.

It constantly goes against the grain, even the casting playing against expectations, with a monumentally miscast Robert Taylor, replete with none-too-convincing make-up as the Native American hero, gradually managing to shrug off his matinee idol image to turn in his best screen performance - headstrong, angry and surprisingly impassioned - in a role that must have been surprisingly relevant when the film was shot only four years after the end of WW2. Like many GIs returning from the war (be it WW2 or Korea), his character has spent the past few years fighting for the American dream in the Civil War only to find out that he's not eligible, in his case by virtue of his color. The notion of a truly United States that he fought for, a utopia where people "didn't die for nothing," proves a lie. The sense of post-war disillusionment that fuelled the film noir genre constantly drives both the story and the remarkable visual style of the film in ways almost unique in the genre.

In a curious but highly effective inversion of traditional lighting techniques, in the night scenes the foregrounds and interiors are darkly lit, rendering the players silhouettes, while the valley that dominates the action is clearly visible. The film noir connections go beyond John Alton's lighting. Like the traditional noir hero, Taylor finds that nothing he does can avert the deepening nightmare that ultimately destroys him. He tries to act within the law, but finds himself frustrated by it at every turn. Despite fighting for the United States and earning a Congressional Medal, he finds that in the eyes of the law he is not even an American citizen. It is illegal for him to homestead his own land. It is illegal for him to buy it back from homesteaders. Even a petition from the few sympathetic townspeople is dismissed out of hand.

Yet surprisingly, instead of reducing his plight to black and white moral issues, Guy Trosper's screenplay deals in shades of grey. The sheep men who persecute him are not the caricatures you might expect - their problems are just as pressing as his. Nor is the racial prejudice overdone or driven home with sledgehammer pontificating: the hate is there, so ingrained that it doesn't need to be emphasised. Even Louis Calhern's tormenter-in-chief regards hating `redskins' as such a natural thing that he never descends into overstated melodramatic villainy, the actor responding with a skilled performance that makes him all the more immoveable and unyielding for being the human incarnation of the way things have always been. Mann underplays his `comeuppance,' placing it well before the film's finale (remarkably similar to the pitched battle at the end of Cimino's `Heaven's Gate) and its tragic conclusion. It is inevitable, unsatisfying and ultimately resolves nothing. Like everything else Lance does on both sides of the law, it is totally futile. From the moment he returns, he has no control over his fate.

There is no doubt that the film would never have been made without the influence of Dore Schary, the liberal at King Louis' court at MGM, but with this and his later, bitterly disillusioned Men in War, it is surprising that Mann did not come under the kind of unwelcome scrutiny by the HUAC enjoyed by many of his contemporaries. Perhaps it was because even when it came out it was so under the radar that, in many ways, it missed the boat. A nervous MGM shelved it until the later, and lighter Broken Arrow was released and took all the critical and box-office laurels and gave audiences a more hopeful ending than the still shockingly stark and bitter one Mann delivers in a remarkably uncompromising film that was decades ahead of its time. Incredibly powerful, it deserves to be so much better known.