Ramrod (1947)

Touches You

Best movie ever!

Absolutely the worst movie.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Joel McRea (Dave) is asked by Veronica Lake (Connie) to protect her sheep-grazing land from town bully Preston Foster (Ivey) who wants it for his cattle. McRea recruits a gang that includes Don Defore (Bill) and they are heavily leaned on by Foster and his crew. Can McRea make a difference? The Ramrod referred to is McRea as Lake Veronica's central tough guy. Veronica herself is no shrinking flower in this. In fact, she's the opposite and ditches her glamorous looks. I only spotted one brief scene in which she was wearing make-up and she looked a completely different woman. The glamour role goes to Arlene Whelan (Rose) as McRea's girlfriend. Uh-oh, complications….looks like Lake is moving in on McRea as well.The cast are all good but unfortunately the film is chronically dull. Yawn, yawn….fall asleep….wake up….yawn…..nothing going on….fall asleep again…horses riding and a bit of shooting. There is nothing new about the story and it unfolds at a slow pace. Uninteresting. Shame.

I won't comment on what has been written by several others here, regarding the noir-ish qualities of the material. I do want to mention some things that caught me off guard, in a very good way, from the moment the film began. First off, the writers and director de Toth were confident enough in their material not to spoonfeed their audience. Indeed, the first few minutes are so opaque it seems as if we may have come in in the middle of the film. In reality, we've come in in the middle, not of the film, but of the characters' lives, and the filmmakers allow us to figure out what's going on much as a stranger arriving in town would have to figure out what this drama is that's occurring around him. Adding to the intelligent and innovative approach to the story is the cinematography of Russell Harlan. Harlan, who shot Red River, Lust for Life, The Big Sky, and To Kill a Mockingbird, certainly knew how to place a camera and light a scene. For de Toth, Harlan's camera moves almost constantly, innumerable dolly shots (far more than in a typical film of this day) both reveal and obfuscate the settings in such a way as to keep the viewer always a little off-balance as to where the action is moving next. It's a skillful means of unsettling the viewer. The casting as well performs similarly. Joel McCrea is a familiar figure in Western leading roles, but here he's both a reformed drunk and so soft-spoken and comparatively passive as to be almost the antithesis of what we expect. Veronica Lake gets one soft scene with her hair down and almost peekabooing, but for the rest of the film it's up tight on her head, and she's up tight in the role. She's an interesting case, a pitiable femme fatale, a nice girl at first pushed then willingly galloping down the wrong road. Charlie Ruggles, typically a comic father type, here is stern but not heartless, wrongheaded but goodhearted. And the best piece of off-beat casting in the film is light comedian Don DeFore as the rascally, promiscuous, and deadly Bill, a gunman with a seductive smile and the grim good humor that one both fears and wants to protect. DeFore's performance is the best I've ever seen him give, and it made me wish he'd done more like this. Thankfully (and oddly), the script gives him plenty of screen time, much more in fact (toward the end) than one would expect, given that he's not the lead in the picture. There have been bad good-guys like Bill in scores of Westerns before and since, but few with the charisma and style that Don DeFore brings to this one. All in all, I was amazed by the complexity and shades of gray in this film, which I completely expected to be just another good old shoot-em-up. Well worth watching.

I hadn't realised that Lake was so incredibly short. Having only seen her in three films opposite Alan Ladd, whose comparatively small stature made him an ideal screen partner, it was surprising to see the 6' 3" Joel McCrea positively tower above her. This must have caused headaches for the cinematographer who was valiantly trying to frame both stars into every shot. Nevertheless, Lake doesn't let her petite size get in the way of a solid performance, and, indeed, her character is surprisingly malevolent. Borrowing a leaf from the femme fatales of the film noir style, which was in full swing by the late 1940s, Lake's Connie Dickason is a feisty customer, a pugnacious ranch-woman whose determination to upset the balance of power in her small western town turns her as nasty as the male oppressors whom she so despises. She deliberately breaks the law to achieve her self-righteous ends, and attempts to rope men into her scheme through the promise of sex. Yet Connie remains a moderately sympathetic character.If one considers 'Ramrod' as one of the first film noir/westerns, then Connie is the ill-fated hero who knowingly chooses a path of dishonesty, and is condemned by it. McCrea's Dave Nash, on the other hand, represents the Western side of the story, a washed-up cowboy who, against all odds, chooses the path of nobility, pursuing justice strictly through honourable (and legal) channels. This blending of genres yields the film an interesting thematic tone, I think, though the story itself is so familiar that there are few surprises to be had along the way. Upon hearing of her deception, Dave shuns Connie's affections, instead choosing to marry the passive but sincere Rose (Arleen Whelan), the epitome of a dependable house-wife {I'd seen Whelan before, in the William Powell comedy 'The Senator was Indiscreet (1947),' though I don't remember the specifics of her role}. Connie is left, alone and rejected, to ponder the men whose deaths she inadvertently orchestrated. True to the film noir spirit, she is offered no redemption.

I looked this up on Comcast and the title suggested it might be interesting with a title that smacks of sexual symbolism. The description talked about cattle barons and a hard time, so I thought it might be another Brokeback Mountain.Well, it wasn't that at all It was about evil and out of control cowpokes. Joel McCrea (the ramrod) 1s the honest cowpoke who comes out of his drunken stupor after losing his family to find his own way. But his costar, Veronica Lake as Connie Dickason, steals the film as a strong-willed butch-type, who goes against the wishes of her rancher father Ben Dickason (Charles Ruggles) and refuses to marry his choice--the evil Frank Ivey (Preston Foster) and goes for a sheep man. GASP! Evidently, she wants someone she can whip.Well, somehow sheep boy skedaddles out of town and leaves his sheep ranch to his fiancée, who proceeds to fight daddy and Ivey.This is NOT a misogynist Bond movie! It is a western done by a Hungarian director, which had an interesting script with a lot more than you usually see in a cowboy movie.