Calamity Jane and Sam Bass (1949)

Touches You

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Blistering performances.

Yvonne de Carlo has to share Howard Duff's(Sam Bass) romantic interest with Dorothy Hart(Kathy Egan) in this Technicolor 'B' western, directed by the talented 'B' picture specialist George Sherman. Obviously, Dorothy was characterized as 'the good girl', while Yvonne, as Calamity Jane, was characterized as 'the bad girl'. Both fell in love with the handsome, but dirt poor, Bass almost immediately. Calamity more dominates the 2nd half, while Kathy is more influential in the first half. Director Sherman ordered some great close-ups of Yvonne's face, especially toward the end. For a more fun western costarring Yvonne, I recommend "Frontier Gal". Both these films are currently available at YouTube. I disagree with the paragraph under 'Trivia' at this site, which claims that there is little historically accurate information about Bass in this film. The inclusion of the 2 women is the greatest fictional component. As mentioned in the film, Bass was raised on an Indiana farm, and gradually made his way south and west, finally to Denton, TX. He did work for Sheriff Will Egan on his ranch, saved his money and bought an excellent race horse, named 'the Denton Mare'. He won some races with her and was skilled in other bets on horses. Later, he did get into robbing stages, trains, and banks. The dramatized train robbery at Big Spring Station closely duplicates the details of what actually happened, including the wood boxes holding a fortune in gold coins. His fatal attempt at robbing the Round Rock bank is also dramatized.Howard Keel, as Bass, doesn't present the sort of charisma a John Wayne or Gary Cooper would, but he does an adequate job. Yvonne makes a striking, if quite unreal, facsimile of Calamity.

Sometimes you feel a film counts more for its nostalgic values than for its merits. And this western is worth seeing just for that, and also for its great Technicolor. From the days of my youth when I read comics I learned that Sam Bass was quite a mean guy. Here he is a hero , but a doomed hero because no outlaw could get away from Hollywood's moral code. Anyway you root for him as you feel he is getting every time into more trouble specially because of his taste for horse races. I am not a a fan of Yvonne de Carlo, she was the star in two awful westerns "Frontier Gal" and "Salome, where she danced", but here she manages to let Howard Duff as Sam Bass be the main character even though Calamity Jane comes first in the title. Lloyd Bridges is Sam's friend, Joel Collins. George Sherman, besides directing wrote the film's story.

....since Sam Bass is clearly the central character here, and Calamity Jane the peripheral one. Actually, Calamity is just one of the two women between whom Sam Bass is caught - the other is an incredibly sweet, sensible shopkeeper played by Dorothy Hart - and it really is quite the dilemma. I found myself pondering whom I would choose if I were in his place, but I couldn't make up my mind. Calamity is a role that suits Yvonne De Carlo perfectly - you can tell she is very comfortable with it - and Dorothy Hart is very appealing, too. The Technicolor photography is pleasing to the eye, and the story generally keeps your interest and leads to a surprisingly strong (sad & enigmatic) ending. **1/2 out of 4.

This is largely an unremarkable little film, with mostly wooden performances typical of the time in which it was made, but it does show how easy it is for a man to take the wrong turning through no fault of his own, when circumstances beyond his control provide no other option.