A spoiled brat of a kid learns about responsibility and teamwork when he’s isolated from his rich father and rescued by a compassionate cowboy on a cattle drive.
It may not be on anyone’s list of the great, even familiar Westerns, but Cattle Drive offers a quieter, warmer view of the great outdoors. The best of it, despite predictable clichés, is the charisma between its two stars, a stalwart among Westerns and almost always cast as a nice guy, reflecting his nice-guy affability in real life, Joel McCrea, and young child star Dean Stockwell.
One of the few child stars to maintain a career into adulthood, this would be Stockwell’s last appearance as his earlier self. Following a five-year hiatus in television, he would return to the big screen as one of two brothers in another Western, Gun for a Coward (1956), though he is trampled to death in a cattle stampede.
A land-based version of Captains Courageous (1937) with Spencer Tracy, the most original part of Cattle Drivewould seem to be Maury Gertsman’s cinematography when McCrea chases a wild black stallion, a somewhat idée fixe of the film. Not so. The cinematographer for the scene was actually Irving Glassberg, also, like Gertsman, a European, and the sequence was lifted from another Western, The Red Canyon (1949). McCrea’s apparel was adjusted to match Howard Duff’s.
As for technical errors, the photo McCrea’s character shows one of the cowpokes of “his girl back in Santa Fe,” actually of McCrea’s wife actress Frances Dee, is in a deep, rich color that would have been impossible in the 1870s, even with the hand-tinted daguerreotypes.
Never fire a gun when herding cattle was an unwritten law of the West. At one point when a cowpoke shoots at the stallion, the cattle logically stampede, yet in an earlier scene, a gun is fired to start a horse race between McCrea and Henry Brandon and the cattle don’t stampede!
A young boy, Chester (Stockwell), attempts to gain the attention of a negligent father (Leon Ames) by roughhousing with some boys aboard a train headed for Santa Fe. The father owns the railroad. While the train stops for water, Chester wanders into the desert. In trying to return when he realizes the train is leaving, he falls into a ravine in the path of wrangler Dan Matthews (McCrea in Tracy’s role as Manuel), who has long been in pursuit of a wild black stallion.
Having lost the chance to rope a much sought-after animal, Dan now seems compelled to rescue the little brat, who attempts to browbeat him into taking him to Santa Fe. Dan threatens to leave the boy but Chesterfinally agrees to accompany him to the camp of the cattle drive.
There, the trail boss, Cap (Howard Petrie, the equivalent of the fishing schooner’s captain, Lionel Barrymore) warns the boy that if he doesn’t pitch in and work with the cowboys, he doesn’t eat. After starving for a day, he accepts food from Dan, who relates that he, too, was a troublemaker in his youth. And the boy makes friends with the cook, Dallas (Chill Wills, in the Mickey Rooney role).
Dan teachers Chester cattle-driving skills, at which he becomes proficient. Without complaining, the boy suffers the wind and heat during a trek to an elusive watering hole, earning the esteem of the men. He does his share of the work, comes to relish being a cowboy and is actually dreading returning to his father.
At first resented by Currie (Brandon, best remembered as Scar in The Searchers, 1956) who sees the boy as a bad omen for the cattle drive, Currie and the other men later realize that the boy’s safety is all that matters during a frightening stampede.
After a few other adventures and misadventures, by the time the cattle drive arrives in Santa Fe, Dan has become more of a dad to Chester than his real one. Graham vows to be a better father and allows Chester to accompany Dan in his continued search for the black stallion.
Joel McCrea was one of the most popular and enduring of the actors who rode the range, strolled the streets or carried a gun in the history of American Western cinema—he made some thirty-five movies in the genre. He was perhaps less rugged than Glenn Ford, more friendly and emotional than Randolph Scott, less versatile than James Stewart, more engaging than Audie Murphy, devoid of any of the cynicism of Clint Eastwood and the antithesis of John Wayne in all respects.
Among the many other Western actors, stars as well as the countless supporting ones—Harry Carey, Jr., Ward Bond, John McIntire, Ben Johnson, Walter Brennan, Strother Martin, etc.—McCrea holds his own against the best of them.
McCrea’s first Western was Scarlet River way back in 1933, and then he starred with Barbara Stanwyck in Cecil B. DeMille’s epic Union Pacific in Hollywood’s banner year of 1939.
Stanwyck would be McCrea’s costar in another Western, Trooper Hook (1957), in which the actor, now a cavalry sergeant, returns a rescued wife and her young squaw son to her husband. Unimaginable for some Western stars, most of all Eastwood, to even associate with children much less have a kinship with them, McCrea starred in a number of films with them—he had three children of his own.
In Saddle Tramp, one of four films McCrea made in 1950, he is saddled—no pun intended—with four kids orphaned when their father is killed, and at the ranch where he finds work, he must hide them because the owner doesn’t like children.
In McCrea’s final movie and coincidentally a Western, Mustang Country (1976), he is once again joined by a young boy, here a Native American (Nika Mina, in his only film) to capture the last wild mustang in Montana, another elusive horse. (There was another wild black stallion in Black Horse Canyon, 1954.)
Joel McCrea came out of a four-year retirement to make Mustang Country. Unfortunate. It is a weak film, afflicted with little drama and clips from other films. For an actor who had made far, far better—Union Pacific, Foreign Correspondent (1940), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The More the Merrier (1943) and Ride the High Country (1962)—it is a poor valediction to a career and to a man who was so well liked, on and off screen.
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I have seen Joel McCrea in a lot of movies and I think he’s at his best in westerns.