Big budget westerns from the past are looking better than ever — the fine cinematography and big-star casts dazzle as contemporary films never do. Steve McQueen took a leap to stand-alone action stardom in Henry Hathaway’s prequel to The Carpetbaggers, telling a western backstory. The film’s violence is extremely rough for 1966, and an impressive roster of actors brings the drama to life: Brian Keith, Karl Malden, Arthur Kennedy, Martin Landau, Suzanne Pleshette, Janet Margolin, Raf Vallone and many others. The new disc’s audio commentary is highly informative, too.

Nevada Smith
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1966 / Color B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 130 min. / Street Date July 18, 2023 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95
Starring: Steve McQueen, Brian Keith, Karl Malden, Arthur Kennedy, Martin Landau, Suzanne Pleshette, Janet Margolin, Raf Vallone, Pat Hingle, Howard Da Silva, Paul Fix, Gene Evans, Josephine Hutchinson, John Doucette, Val Avery, Lyle Bettger, Bert Freed, Sandy Kenyon, Ric Roman, John Litel, Ted de Corsia, Loni Anderson, Iron Eyes Cody, Chuck Hayward, L.Q. Jones, Strother Martin, Joanna Moore, Chuck Roberson, Roy N. Sickner, Edy Williams, Chief Yowlachie.
Cinematography: Lucien Ballard
Art Directors: Hal Pereira, Tambi Larsen, Al Roelofs
Film Editor: Frank Bracht
Original Music: Alfred Newman
Screenplay by John Michael Hayes based on the character in the novel The Carpetbaggers created by Harold Robbins
Executive Producer: Joseph E. Levine
Produced and Directed by Henry Hathaway

By the middle ’60s, wildcat producer Joseph E. Levine had become a potent force in filmmaking. Just a few years earlier he’d made his mark with foreign imports, re-editing, re-dubbing them and sometimes spending a fortune on saturation advertising:  Gojira,  Le fatiche de Ercole,  Jack the Ripper,  Vynález Zkázy. By 1962 he’d bought his way into indirect producership on MGM’s Boys’ Night Out and 20th Fox & Titanus’ Sodom and Gomorrah. Paperback trash novels then became his forte, with Polly Adler’s A House is Not a Home, Landau and Shulman’s Harlow and finally Harold Robbins’ The Carpetbaggers, the steamy tale of Jonas Cord, a Howard Hughes- like wheeler-dealer played by George Peppard.

Levine must have had some creative attorneys, for he retained the right to spin off additional movies based on characters in The Carpetbaggers, in particular Jonas Cord’s substitute father and mentor Nevada Smith, played by Alan Ladd. The result is Nevada Smith, a 1966 prequel starring Steve McQueen in his first starring action vehicle.

Levine and Paramount had hired Edward Dmytryk for Carpetbaggers; they turned to a proven western expert to tell the story of Nevada Smith. Henry Hathaway had begun his feature career in westerns, and he’d lately been spinning hits for John Wayne — North to Alaska, The Sons of Katie Elder. He’d cap his directing career with the marvelous original version of True Grit. For Nevada Smith Hathaway and screenwriter John Michael Hayes (Rear Window) extend the violence of Hathaway’s previous From Hell to Texas.

The sprawling tale gives Steve McQueen a breakout part after his two well-received dramas Love with the Proper Stranger and The Cincinatti Kid. The tough Henry Hathaway and authoritative Robert Wise may have been the last two directors who could tell McQueen what to do on the set. He was already leveraging his star clout to take full control of his career. Perhaps the star and director got along well because McQueen had his own money in the show – Nevada Smith was a 3-way deal with Paramount and Levine’s Embassy pictures backing up Steve McQueen’s personal Solar Productions.

Nevada Smith is a revenge story writ large, expanding on the fury underlying John Ford’s The Searchers. Hathaway even uses Ford’s iconic doorway frame to show the young hero fearfully entering the cabin where his parents have been slaughtered. Instead of warning Max not to ‘waste his life in vengeance,’ a neighbor lady (Josephine Hutchinson of Son of Frankenstein) urges him to go get ’em: “There is no law.”

The ugly opening shows the outlaws Jesse Coe, Bill Bowdre and Tom Fitch (Jesse Coe, Arthur Kennedy & Karl Malden) committing an atrocity. Miner Sam Sand (Gene Evans) is tied up and his wife (Isabel Boniface) brutally tortured to death. When their young-adult son Max Sand (Steve McQueen) comes upon their bodies, he devotes his life to bloody retribution. Advice and mentoring is provided by the wandering gun salesman Jonas Cord Sr. (Brian Keith). Suitably primed for trouble, Max sets out to track down the three killers, letting neither love nor promises stand in his way. A wide gallery of men and women help or hinder him in his quest.

Even though his face already had deep creases, Steve McQueen is again supposed to be a callow, inexperienced kid. He had looked too old to be a teenager in his starring debut in The Blob, eight years earlier. He’s settled on the basics of his screen persona, and holds our interest at all times. Brian Keith is fine in his few scenes as the clichéd tutor figure common to coming-of-age Westerns. His Jonas Cord Sr. character is played in The Carpetbaggers by Leif Erickson. But the two pictures might as well be disconnected, as they fall into different genres, in different time periods.

Nevada Smith’s realistic violence retains an unsavory, borderline exploitative aspect. For McQueen to expend two hours hunting down the villains, their crime has to be a nasty one. Violence toward women became a popular theme in late ’50s movies, especially in advertising campaigns that teased sex and cruelty. Two movies added a racist angle. John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge spends 90 minutes proving that a black soldier didn’t menace a white woman. John Sturges’ excellent Last Train from Gun Hill begins almost identically to Nevada Smith, when a sheriff’s native-American wife is raped and murdered.

Max Sand’s mother Tabinaka is also native-American. She is played — uncredited — by Isabel Boniface. There’s no rape, but Hathaway shows her bare back as the villain Martin Landau makes two cuts with his knife, while his friends laugh and jeer. This off-putting atrocity is almost the first thing we see. Later on we hear a sickening description of her being skinned alive. scene. The scene itself is racist: the censors apparently permit the partly naked woman being tortured because she’s not white.

It’s My Lai or Nothing.

The sickening scene is used to motivate and justify Max Sand’s epic revenge. In routine action movies, nasty crimes take the place of real drama, to align the audience behind violent storylines. A good example is the opening of George P. Cosmatos’ Tombstone. Six years before, Henry King’s The Bravados had given the issue some thoughtful debate. It teaches a moral lesson about vigilantism, when revenger Gregory Peck discovers that he’s been tracking and murdering the wrong men.

Max Sand develops into the roughest hombre in the West by learning how to trick-shoot bottles thrown in the air, but little else feels like a cliché. The women he encounters are either prostitutes or almost as available as prostitutes. Max forms no permanent relationships with these deserving people, and all of them get raw deals. Max has to abandon Janet Margolin, and a slightly longer encounter with the luminous Suzanne Pleshette ends in tragedy. It’s part of a longer episode where Max ends up on a prison gang. The convicts are allowed conjugal visits with the ‘Cajun girls’ who work as virtual slaves in the nearby rice fields. This allows tha show to match its edgy violence with some MPAA-stretching sexual situations. Nothing’s shown beyond holding hands and kissing, yet the adult context feels more pronounced than usual.

Unlike some revisionist westerns — Jerry Thorpe’s Day of the Evil Gun comes to mind — Max Sand encounters mostly decent people on his travels. Max learns to read during the movie. At one point he asks questions about the Bible, but rejects the words of Raf Vallone’s kindly priest, and pursues his agenda of payback without regret.  (ending spoiler)   Instead of a final moral reckoning, Max decides that finishing off his last quarry is beneath his dignity. He simply leaves the man to bleed to death in agony, which is conceivably more cruel. Is that ending more realistic, or blandly cynical?

Director Henry Hathaway directs with a steady hand. His blocking introduces at least fifteen name character actors, and gives most of them room to shine; the biggest pleasure in rewatching the film is to appreciate so many familiar faces. The real star of the show is ace cameraman Lucien Ballard, who gives the film a glorious Big Sky look without letting it turn into a travelogue. The familiar Inyo Park exteriors are direct and handsome, but nicely understated. The long section set in the Louisiana swamp prison is also attractively shot.

That long list of fave actors will cheer any western fan, even if many are restricted to brief episodes. Howard da Silva, Pat Hingle and Ted de Corsia get nice bits. Janet Margolin (Take the Money and Run) isn’t embarrassed by her turn as a Kiowa maiden- turned ‘dance hall girl.’ Suzanne Pleshette doesn’t get a chance to develop her brief role as the Cajun looker Pilar, yet makes the most lasting impression.

Joanna Cook Moore  ↑   has one memorable scene as Martin Landau’s widow. Besides being the mother of Tatum O’Neal, Moore played in Robert Altman’s Countdown, Disney’s Son of Flubber, and was the daughter of the murdered tycoon Linnaker in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. Actress-spotters should also look out for Loni Anderson (her first film), and Edy Williams (her seventh). Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones also appear in one scene, very briefly.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of Nevada Smith rejuvenates this box office success from the summer of 1966, giving America an early hint of the coming wave of violent westerns. Both Howard Hawks’ El Dorado and Richard Brooks’ The Professionals arrived at the year’s end. Although all three of the Sergio Leone movies had been out in Europe for over a year, they wouldn’t start arriving here until January 1967.

This is Kino’s second Blu-ray debut for a very good but curiously semi-forgotten Steve McQueen show — just last April they brought us McQueen in Don Siegel’s excellent Hell is for Heroes.

The new disc looks far better than Paramount’s DVD from (gulp) twenty years ago. Again, ace camera artist Lucien Ballard gets to work his magic — the visuals not as pretty as True Grit and not as bleak as The Wild Bunch. Ballard gets atmospheric beauty out of every imaginable exterior, at all times of day.  ^*

The soundtrack has more punch, too. It showcases Alfred Newman’s late-career film score, a good track that dates the show somewhat — it isn’t as progressive as what Jerry Goldsmith might have done. That’s not a bad thing, but the conventional, even cheerful-sounding cues don’t always reflect the film’s more extreme content.

Kino throws in some TV spots and a theatrical teaser that trumpets the participation of Joseph E. Levine. Adding considerable enjoyment is a feature commentary with three spokesfolk that know what they’re talking about beyond looking up information in the IMDB. Novelist C. Courtney Joyner,, Mark Jordan Legan (Film Freaks Forever) and Henry C. Parke (Henry’s Western Round-Up) offer good opinions and keep us interested with lots of background facts on the movie, plus excellent information and anecdotes about the 20- plus name actors in the show. The commentators offer personal memories of their encounters with some of these performers.

They go over Steve McQueen’s testy record with directors as well, without branding the actor as a royal pain-in-the-neck who made life miserable for directors like John Sturges. The commentators remind us that although Max Sand at one point uses the ailas ‘Smith,’ nobody ever calls him Nevada Smith. He gives himself that name much later — in The Carpetbaggers — when he becomes a star of silent cowboy movies.

I never thought of it before, but the fancy shirtless poster art for Nevada Smith must have been aimed to top Paul Newman’s one-sheet for Hud, the one that Joe Buck takes with him to New York City. After having to accept a marginalized role way back in Newman’s Somebody Up There Likes Me, was Steve McQueen anxious to claim sex-symbol status over the previous box office champ?

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Nevada Smith
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good +
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Author/Screenwriter C. Courtney Joyner, Jordan Legan and Henry Parke
Theatrical Teaser
3 TV Spots, 1 Radio Spot.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case in card sleeve
Reviewed: October 5, 2023
(7004neva)

^*   Hey, just where IS the much-needed 4K Ultra HD release of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch?  The movie was one of the first WB titles remastered for VHS, laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray — a restoration could pull even more beauty out of Lucien Ballard’s images, and a decent disc producer would go the extra mile to reinstated the film’s Road Show intermission and rumored last-minute censorship edits!

Visit CineSavant’s Main Column Page
Glenn Erickson answers most reader mail: cinesavant@gmail.com

Text © Copyright 2023 Glenn Erickson