Gary Cooper Does a Last Western

The Hanging Tree (1959) Deals Harsh Hand

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What makes me uncomfortable with The Hanging Tree? Maybe it’s crepe hung over Gary Cooper, his character, Cooper himself. There are signals from a start that the town will rise against him and he’ll be strung from the title tree. How he regards it, post-titles, is presage to Cooper being dragged there. Delmer Daves directed The Hanging Tree. He was at verge of new fame staging hysteria with teen stars (stars, that is, playing teens). They'd be characters misunderstood and victimized by gossip. A same happens to Cooper in rounder-bout ways, except thick pioneer tongues get murderous once driven by gold lust made intense by New York 50’s actors gone whole-hog (Karl Malden, George C. Scott, womenfolk mean to cores). Cooper meanwhile plays so close-to-vest that we barely get "Joe Frail's" backstory, how he burned up a plantation and presumably a brother taken up with his wife. The Hanging Tree is glum to extremes, Cooper tortured by the hinted-at past. Close-ups on his monument of a face show thirty years at persona building paid off by light of a cigar, flipping off a spent bullet to reveal character others could not convey with five pages of dialogue ... there was no such authority from any beyond Cooper and a handful with comparable backlog.

Delmer Daves Directs Cooper and Maria Schell

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50’s-driven domestic drama bled into other genres, notably here with busy-bodies wrecking Cooper as healer and potential mate to Maria Schell, the blinded woman he rescues. I wanted Coop to strap on sixes and put drop to loose talk and never mind crooked card deals or would-be faster draws. What does The Hanging Tree have in common with likes of All That Heaven Allows? Plenty … in fact, too much. The 50’s, and not the 1850’s, was never so hot a bed of repression as here. Daves had found a niche and would develop it further. Lush as they are, his Summer Place, Susan Slade, down the line, are unrelieved downers. Unless babies catching fire are your bag (seriously, it happens in Susan Slade), stay off his grass. How were us 50’s-born conceived in shade-drawn, extreme sex-guilt era as depicted in these? Man Of The West, Cooper’s previous, had some of same taint, his and Julie London’s ordeal a sick ritual as woven into much writing of the period. Scribes graduated off tube-live dramas took liberties many had itched for, result unease for filmgoers. Did this hasten skid for westerns? Television dealt simpler per network standard/practices, but then look at Bonanza. They are depressing to a fault, save isolated episodes where Hoss overeats flapjacks or sees leprechauns.

He had the face work I know, but Cooper seems to have settled into tightened features by this point, for he looks fine in The Hanging Tree. Does countenance adjust to soften plastic surgery’s effect? Granted he was carefully photographed. There was back pain when Cooper got on his horse, director Daves later assuming that was start of cancer that felled the actor (Anthony Perkins observed a same problem during Friendly Persuasion). Characters Cooper played were laid low by gloom of late vehicles, tall trees everyone was intent to chop down. Did despair they project reflect Cooper’s own? He chose Ten North Frederick and They Came To Cordura after all (in fact co-produced the latter). Was it for Cooper to expiate our shared sins of the past? Frederick is lately out on Blu-Ray, which I applaud, but OMG, what a dampener, Coop as cuckold plus sire of neurotic offspring, a coin 50’s minted and reliable to make watching a chore. Did youth viewership regard themselves as misrepresented? I would have. Picture new-married couples coming out of shows like this and both saying, Honey, let’s never have kids. The Hanging Tree is not fun for me, much as I admire it, being like walk of plank other classics lately are. Maybe getting older for real makes grim films the grimmer. I keep wishing The Hanging Tree could be more a traditional western rather than trying to be something else, because that something leaves me in a slump. But then there is spectacular location plus a stirring Max Steiner score to link The Hanging Tree with westerns as once they were.

Look-Alike Visitors to The Hanging Tree Location

L.A. First-Run Saturation

I know a local front row kid who was visiting Washington state in ’58, stumbled across the busy site of Hanging Tree production (Yakima), and spent a day watching progress, being welcomed there, seeing stars, the whole kit. Heroes on TV could be heroic, but lead men in theatre westerns came on flawed and left that way, assuming they finished up whole. Cooper’s Joe Frail is a good man, if unapproachable, everyone piled on him where they should thank his saving their hostile lives. Did this come of 50's demand that males be sensitive to community need? James Stewart took a trimming for anti-social attitude in The Far Country. Shot up, his friend dead of villainous design, yet Jim still owes ingrates who withhold credit for his disposing of evil force that is John McIntire and minions. Nothing short of laying down guns and joining the Chamber of Commerce will do. He-men off prewar frontiers had to bend, or be broken. I get forbode for Cooper had he lived deeper into the 60's --- Gable too, let alone Bogart. These people not only belonged to their Classic Era, they could not trespass beyond it, except for revivals and late show posting of irretrievable past they stood for.