The Virginian [VHS] Overview
The third of five screen versions of Owen Wister's novel and play The Virginian is the only one that merits classic status. It's not a masterpiece, mind you, and not a great Western. But it is a landmark in the genre for defining some archetypal characters and situations, and for certifying the stardom of a key Western icon, Gary Cooper.
You could say this 1929 movie hasn't aged well: the pace is spavined, the dialogue groans like a rickety ladder, and Cooper's pancake makeup occasionally leaves him looking like an eye-batting odalisque. Yet in other ways the film's datedness feels like validation. From the vantage of the 21st century, this movie was made nearly as long ago as the era it describes, and the roughhewn town buildings, the absence of a music score, and the glimmering light (it always seems to be just after sunrise or just before sunset) all belong to a privileged moment, an unspoiled, vanished world.
That feeling is never stronger than in the great and terrible centerpiece of the film, the hanging of the rustlers--including one of the most sympathetic characters we have come to know. This is a harrowing sequence, the more so for being played matter-of-factly, even tenderly. And the climactic showdown in the streets of Medicine Bow is pretty fine, too. With Walter Huston, newly in from Broadway in his first Hollywood role, as that snake-in-the-grass Trampas; Richard Arlen as Steve; Mary Brian as the new schoolmarm; and frog-voiced Eugene Pallette, not yet too swollen to sit a horse, enhancing the new world of sound as Honey Wiggin. --Richard T. Jameson
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