3:10 To Yuma: A Comparison

Rating: 6/10 (5 June 2010)

The original '3:10 To Yuma' (Delmer Daves; 1957) starts off dramatically enough: a farmer, Dan Evans (played by Van Helfin) and his two sons, searching for their wayward cows, witness a stagecoach robbery in which the driver attempts to fend off the bandits by taking one of them hostage, only to find the leader of the gang, Ben Wade (Glenn Ford, in his only film role as a villain), shoot both the hostage and the driver in order to prevent his gang's capture. Apologetic, he demands the stage driver be taken back to his home, because, he says, "every man deserves to be buried at home."
This is in stark contrast to the remake, '3:10 To Yuma' (James Mangold; 2007). This 'modern' interpretation finds the original's dramatic impetus lacking, and instead opens with Dan Evans' (Christian Bale) homestead under attack by guns-for-hire, who burn down his barn in their latest attempt to force him from his land, so that it can be appropriated by the railroad. We learn that the farmer's son is ill, and that drought is soon to take all of his cattle, before Dan and his children witness a bloody and ultra-violent robbery of a steampunk-esquire armour-plated, machine-gun wielding stagecoach by Ben Wade's (Russell Crowe) gang, where several men on both sides of the confrontation are killed amidst a frenzy of bullets.
This increase in aggression carries throughout the remake. Where Glenn Ford's Ben was more of an adventuresome, charming scoundrel in the lead of a 'gentleman's gang', Russell Crowe is, quite frankly, just another mildly charismatic, garden variety criminal whose only distinction is that he and his gang will resort to absolutely anything in the pursuit of their ill- gotten fortunes. Crowe's Ben stabs a man to death with a fork as retribution for taunts, and throws a man off a cliff for insulting his heritage, because "bad men love their Momma's too." Ford's commits no further violence beyond the original killing -- and arguably, he does not need to, since the demonstration of his capacity for murder only needed to be demonstrated once for his audience.
At this point in both versions, Ben takes Dan's horses and sends him on his way, which, although in the original seems like something Ford's Wade would likely do -- to spare any further bloodshed -- is quite out of character for Crowe's Wade, given the ruthlessness he shows in the robbery. This point is mildly perplexing. In the remake, Dan is given the additional task of dragging a wounded man back to Bisby, where we once again diverge from the original, having Dan not meet the posse sent to find Wade, and hence formulate a plan for his capture, but instead the farmer finds Ben in the saloon coincidentally, in the hunt for the man who is trying to force him from his land. The end of the scene is essentially the same, however -- Dan is offered $200 to help escort Wade to Contention City, where he will be put on the 3:10 train to Yuma to face trial.
To increase the running time by half an hour, the journey to Contention city is drawn out in the remake, whereas the original skips almost directly from Evans' homestead to the hotel. During the journey, Wade kills two of his captors, they fight with Apaches, and after Ben escapes, he is tortured by railway men. This additional plot adds a great deal of action to the film, making it less of a psychological thriller than the original.
Despite all of the remakes high-budget bluster, I prefer the original. Glenn Ford's attempt to corrupt the 'incorruptible' Dan Evans by saving him from his financial troubles is far more believable than the disingenuous portrayal of Wade by Crowe, and that crucial element of the original plot is lost in not only the sound and fury of the remake, but in the character of Dan Evans himself.
The remake gets 6/10.