The Maverick Queen

Plot synopsis:
Beautiful and willful Kit Banion is the Maverick Queen. She is a saloon owner and one of the leaders of an outlaw gang called the Wild Bunch. As the story unfolds Kit proves she is tough and smart, and can ride and shoot as well as any man. A Pinkerton agent posing as outlaw Jeff Younger is sent to infiltrate the Wild Bunch and gather evidence against the gang. As Jeff works his way into the gang he soon meets Kit. Kit falls hard for Jeff and throws over her former lover Sundance. As things progress Kit falls more in love with Jeff, never suspecting his true identity. Eventually a series of events exposes Jeff and he is made prisoner at the gang's hideout. Kit learns of Jeff's true identity and risks everything to ride to the hideout to save him. Kit slips into the hideout and helps Jeff escape. They are closely pursued by the gang and after a chase Jeff and Kit are cornered in a cabin. Jeff and Kit attempt to break out of the trap and a gun battle ensues. Jeff is wounded and Kit helps him to a place of safety. Kit is fatally wounded while shielding Jeff from a member of the gang and dies in Jeff's arms as the posse arrives to save the day. The Wild Bunch comes to an end because of the Maverick Queen.

Tags: historical fiction

Review:
One night in camp her and her partner are joined by Jeff Young  a man who saves them when they are later ambushed by the Sundance Kid and his gang.
Sundance reports back to Kit Banion (aka the Maverick Queen) and she in enraged by his failure.
Shame then that it doesn't all come off, it is interesting and engaging but it does struggle to keep it tight with so many things going on  I wasn't sure exactly what my focus was supposed to be.
This is also seen by it taking 15 minutes before the title character actually made it onto screen, not that bad a thing but just further suggestion of the slight lack of focus that made it a bit harder to get into.
The characters don't all make sense and again the lack of focus meant I was confused as to who I was following.The cast aren't much help in this regard either because nobody really steps up and makes the film their own.
Stanwyck tries hard but she was approaching the end of her long career at this point and she isn't helped by being left in the background for most of the start of the film while the much younger Murphy makes us think the film is about her.
Brady, Petrie and a few others make for interesting bad guys but their performances aren't that interesting and they just accept whatever changes the script throws at them.Overall this is an enjoyable enough western that is fairly run-of-the-mill despite having aspects of it that are more than the standard stuff.
Stanwyck's portrayal of the outlaw woman Kit Banion is an all-time classic.
Stanwyck perfect for the role of the beautiful and strong-willed Kit Banion, leader of the Wild Bunch outlaw gang who can ride and shoot with the best of them.
Perhaps the first thing to note about this film is that the Maverick Queen herself, Kit Banion - cattle trader, saloon proprietor, hand in glove with Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, and the richest woman in Rock Springs - doesn't actually appear until ten to fifteen minutes into the action!
Even then, we initially assume she must be a minor character; surely the lady of the title song must be Lucy Lee - sweeter, younger and far less hard-faced - the girl the hero has already rescued in the first scenes?
(Mary Murphy, just two years into her career, as opposed to Barbara Stanwyck, at this point a full twenty-five years into - and almost at the end of - hers.)But Kit soon takes charge of the situation; and she can look after herself.
There is a scene which cleverly subverts the audience's expectations, in which she is attacked and her lover rides to the rescue - only, before he can arrive, she saves the situation single-handed by deliberately sending her opponent over a cliff.
And in the final gun-battle, it is she who takes an active part when her lover is wounded, forcing him to keep moving, shooting without hesitation to protect him and taking a bullet in his defence.The outlaw gang in this film are not the usual brutal but dim-witted cannon fodder provided for the hero's benefit, either.
As it turns out, they've spotted the plot twist long before the audience (or before me at least!) When the fugitives hole up in a cabin, the pursuers actually take advantage of their superior numbers to surround the cabin and force their way in - and later on, instead of obligingly shooting it out, they simply set fire to the building in order to smoke out their quarry.
Sundance's disappearance after he gets the worse of a struggle with Kit is greeted by Cassidy with no more than "Well, I guess he deserved it", and his subsequent return is accepted with an equal shrug: "Thought you were dead, but I'm glad you ain't." There is no question, for example, of the rest of the outlaws hesitating for a moment to attack when they ride up just because Kit happens to have two of their number held at gunpoint.My main problem with this film is that none of the principal characters seem to have any real motivation for what they are doing.
Jeff at least has a plot rationale for his inconsistent actions - and for why we never see beyond his surface - but neither Kit nor Sundance seem to have sufficient justification for acting clean against their own best interests.
In both cases, they are presumably intended to be in the grip of an overwhelming and unreciprocated affection - but Sundance spends the entire film chasing Lucy Lee rather than the woman who has supposedly prompted him to wild jealousy, and the Maverick Queen also displays an unjustified and distinctly surprising concern towards her.
After all, not only did we see Kit cold-bloodedly engineering this same girl's bankruptcy for her own profit earlier in the film, but she also has to know by this stage that Lucy is her rival for Jeff's affections!But whether due to bad acting or a poor script, Kit doesn't really give the impression in any case of having fallen passionately enough for Jeff to make it plausible that she should give up everything for him.
Her early appearance, when we naturally assume she is the title character, leads us to expect that she is going to have a much larger role than ultimately transpires, but in fact, that initial scene more or less sums up her entire function - to act as a (repeated) plot device so that Sundance's pursuit of her can allow Jeff to get the better of him, and to provide the token 'good woman' required as the hero's love interest.
There is no convincing relationship of any kind established between her and Jeff, any more than there is between Jeff and Kit - or Kit and Sundance.All these characters come across as masks, without little or nothing real going on behind their faces.
That lack of engagement on the part of the audience is, I think, the fatal flaw in this film.I gather it is a Zane Grey adaptation.
Given its intelligently-drawn villains, morally ambiguous title character and cleverly set-up twist, the material might have made even a great off-beat Western...I'm afraid, however, that this isn't it..
In The Maverick Queen you will find the characters of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid in support of Barbara Stanwyck.
And Brady as Sundance is a sexual predator as well.The Maverick Queen was made in the last days of Republic Pictures which was the home of the B movie cowboy.
Something like The Maverick Queen would never have been made at Republic ten years ago.This movie is about sex, it concentrates on Barbara Stanwyck who operates against her own interest because of her attraction for Barry Sullivan.
She's tired of the Sundance Kid as a lover, in fact she urges him to take a bath before putting the moves on her again when we first meet her.As for Brady when it becomes obvious about her attraction to Sullivan, he tries to kill Stanwyck and later attempts to rape Mary Murphy.
The Maverick Queen boasts some nice location photography and was the first of Republic's films to be filmed for the wide screen.
Joni James also sings the title song over the credits and I liked her rendition of it.Unfortunately The Maverick Queen should have been done when the Code was finally done away with, a lot of plot holes might not have occurred.
With notable patrons being none other than Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Fighting off the romantic advances of Sundance, Kit's life gets more interesting when she becomes attracted to a relative of the Younger Brothers' outlaw posse.
Kit could very well be jeopardising much more than a unfulfilled romance if she falls in with the stranger?Directed by the genre prolific Joe Kane and based upon on the novel written by Zane Grey, The Maverick Queen is something of a wasted premise, with all the elements are in place for a twisty psychological Western.
A squib briefly sparked by Barbara Stanwyk (Kit) in one of her later career tough feminine roles, and a pretty as a picture Mary Murphy who also gets to show a bit of spunk.
But the girls can't carry the picture alone...Barry Sullivan was a safe and amiable actor, he however was far from being a leading man who was able to carry a picture up front, thus here as the leading protagonist he struggles badly as he tries to make the tepid Kenneth Gamet screenplay work.
There's a nice kicker in the finale - something that saves the piece from rotting at the bottom of the "B" Western barrel, but sadly it's just not decent enough to warrant a second glance - rendering as fact that both Stanwyck and the audience deserved better.
When Barbara Stanwyck's era of Hollywood superstardom came to an abrupt end in the early fifties, she refused to quit and became the star of a number of feminist westerns which cast her as a tough yet sensuous aging woman in tight pants and a cowboy hat, oftentimes the leader of an outlaw gang.
The Maverick Queen has a bigger budget (and was shot in color) but lacks the energy and magnetism of that later film - both, however, co-star he with Barry Sullivan, a highly underrated leading man who enjoyed far greater success on TV (including a two year stint as Pat Garrett on The Tall Man) than in the movies.
And as the badguy, her former boyfriend the Sundance Kid, there's Scott Brady - who played The Dancing Kid in JOHNNY GUITAR, the very best of the odd westerns that cast visibly aging former big name female stars in cowgirl roles.
Pretty routine stuff bordering on bad in a few scenes...even with Stanwyck chipping in.
The Maverick Queen (1956)Well Barbara Stanwyck made a lot of Westerns in the 1950s, and most of them are routine stuff, and in them she has often limited if still central roles.
She's in the film much less than her co-stars, and the story is a patched together set of common problems--the cattle rancher faces trouble from the cattle rustlers and a hero has come to town, and a little love is going to cross the frontier.The key difference in all these movies is that Stanwyck plays a strong, sometimes very very strong, woman.
you have to pay close attention (and show some patience) to keep in on track.For one example, without giving too much away, the main man, played well by Barry Sullivan, is new in town, and he says he's Jeff Younger, a famous gunslinger.
But then another man arrives in town and says he's Jeff Younger.
Along the same lines, the pretty young girl in town is another strong woman, clearly a good one, and her sidekick is a lazy loaf but a good guy, until you see him start telling people things he shouldn't.
These are really great plot twists but they aren't handled with total clarity or given the impact you might expect so the movie totters a bit.The director, it might be noted, is Joseph Kane, who pretty much only did Westerns, over a hundred of them, and he probably didn't distinguish one from another very well.
(It's a full color Republic Pictures production, and there are corners cut.)The one other interesting side note is the presence of Sundance as a major character (and Butch Cassidy as a very minor one).
But she, too, seems to realize she's doing routine stuff.A final note--I saw this on TCM, and for the first time in twenty years of watching movies there I saw one that was not shown full screen.
With a side plot of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid thrown in, The Maverick Queen can appeal to a wider audience than just die-hard western fans.
Barbara Stanwyck, in her pre-The Big Valley phase, plays a tough saloon owner whose independent attitude attracts attention from both Barry Sullivan and Scott Brady.This one doesn't really stand out in my mind as being an exceptional western, but if you liked Barbara and Barry's chemistry in Forty Guns, you might want to check this out to see them together again.
Stanwyck betrays her outlaw gang to promote and save her new love..
The site summary says that Kit Banion(Barbara Stanwick) was dubbed The Maverick Queen because in her early days around Rock Springs, she would round up all the unbranded cattle she could find and brand them.
Considering the 2 female characters(Kit, and Mary Murphy , as Lucy Lee), this can be deduced as an iconic 'good' girl vs.
'bad' girl film, although they aren't visibly competing for the attention of the lead male: Barry Sullivan, masquerading as Jeff Younger, nephew of the infamous Younger brothers.
In fact, toward the end, they sometimes cooperate as partners with Jeff against the Hole in the Wall Gang, which Kit has been an indispensable part of......If you remember the ending of the Anthony Mann western "The Far Country" Ruth Roman, as the young middle-aged 'bad 'girl, and Corinne Calvert, as the young 'good' girl both had their eyes on Jimmy Stewart, who was fighting for his life against the villain, played by John McIntire.
Kit dies trying to defend the wounded Jeff against a variety of gang members, leaving a cute Lucy as the apparent winner.
In both cases, the younger 'good' girl won, although this is not always the case in westerns("Abilene Town" comes to mind as a clear counter example).......Eventually Jim Davis, dubbed 'The Stranger' in the credits, shows up, looking dapper in his all black outfit.
He would like to meet the outlaw gang, and goes riding off.
Kit would like him to replace The Sundance Kid(Scott Brady) as her primary lover, but recommends that he relocate far from the gang, which she considers doomed, in the long run.
The film was produced by Republic, not long before the demise of this studio, with the phasing out of B westerns.......This was one of the last Hollywood films Barbara would star in.
It was also near the beginning of her emphasis on westerns, which would culminate in her "The Big Valley" TV series, that ended about a decade later.
She would again costar with Barry Sullivan the following year in the western "Forty Guns".
As a leading member of Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid's cattle rustling group, Stanwyck as always shows that she is up to the task.Realizing that the western area is changing with all the settlers coming in, she correctly predicts the end of the era and that the gang will be wiped out.
Butch and Sundance certainly aren't glamorized here as they were with Paul Newman and Robert Redford's "Sundance Kid" in 1969.Despite her participation in this illegal enterprise, Stanwyck is looking for something better in the men she chooses and she finds that in Barry Sullivan, who has infiltrated the gang, a Pinkerton Detective man.A good film which is filmed with traditional lines-"We can't go back," and "I made my path.".
Long before Barbara Stanwyck worked with "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" star Katharine Ross on "The Colbys", she had her own encounter with Butch and Sundance in this colorful western made by Republic Pictures in the mid 1950's.
In her encounter with Sundance (Scott Brady), she tells him "Somewhere along the way, sometime, I'll meet a better man like the ones I used to know, and when I do, I'll drop you like a poisonous snake!" A rail thin Stanwyck shows what she does best, standing up to sinister men, and being just as ruthless in getting what she wants.
Stanwyck rides, shoots and fights with the toughness of the fiercest western hero (heroine).
She finds her match in Jeff Younger (Barry Sullivan), telling him "That's a great name to slung around carelessly" upon their first meeting, indicating to Sundance that she has found the better man.The film makes reference not only to the Younger Brothers ("You might be Younger, but you won't be older if you don't watch out!"), Butch and Sundance but "The Wild Boys" (a violent western made the same year as the Newman/Redford pairing).
Pretty Mary Murphy is perhaps younger and more feminine than the still striking Stanwyck (nearing 50!), but she more than holds her own in her scenes with the female master of melodrama.
"The only way you leave the wild bunch is feet first", Stanwyck explains as she shows shows Kit's softness in a romantic scene with Sullivan, who is not as he appears to be.
Considering that "The Maverick Queen" was the first widescreen film from Republic Studios, you'd think it would be a prestige picture.
Well, apart from sporting a once A-list actress Barbara Stanwyck (who looks pretty awful in color under such heavy makeup), it was far from a memorable movie.The film is about Butch Cassidy and the Hole in the Wall gang.
It seems they are being aided, covertly, by a lady (Stanwyck) who runs a business called 'The Maverick Queen'.
When a guy comes into town saying he wants to join the gang (Barry Sullivan) and that he's Jeff Younger (of the famous Younger gang), Stanwyck goes gaga for the guy and blindly pushed him into a role in their next robbery.
At first the ruse seems to work--until the REAL Younger shows up--then it sure looks as if Nelson's days are numbered.
Additionally, in a scene when there is a showdown and Nelson's character attacks Sundance, not once does Sundance call out for help from his gang who is waiting outside!!
Because of bad writing there is never any suspense in the film if you've seen many westerns--you know what MUST happen with each and every cliché--especially the ending.
Passable entertainment but no more and perhaps my score of 5 is a bit generous.Please note: In the film, Sundance is killed.