Owen Wister's The Virginian (Universal Western Collection) [VHS]
In latter-day interviews Joel McCrea always maintained that producers would cast him "only if they couldn't get somebody really good, like [Gary] Cooper." This very pleasant actor was self-effacing to a fault (and largely mistaken), but when it came to the 1946 remake ofThe Virginian, he had a point. Cooper had doneThe Virginianalready at the dawn of the talkies, and McCrea's incarnation pales beside his, even with the benefit of postcard-pretty Technicolor.But then, this whole movie pales--alongside not only the classic version but most any run-of-the-mill Western. The elements of the sturdy Owen Wister tale--the growing tension between the Virginian and the black-clad cattleman/rustler Trampas, the running critique of vigilante justice by the new schoolmarm from the East, the slide of the hero's feckless pal Steve into outlawry--are still discernible. But everything's been softened (and the ornate frontier dialogue of the 1929 version is gone), and it's difficult to begin to understand how Stuart Gilmore, newly promoted from the film-editing bench, managed to turn in such a flaccid job of direction. He botches even the surefire sequence of the rustlers' hanging, when the Virginian has to... well, we won't play the spoiler.McCrea's shortfall vis-à-vis Cooper is less severe than the gulf between Brian Donlevy's stolid villainy as Trampas and Walter Huston's venomous exuberance 17 years earlier, or Sonny Tufts's Steve vs. Richard Arlen's, or--especially--Barbara Britton's Vermont violet vs. Mary Brian's spunky schoolmarm. As Trampas might bark at this point: Oh, I'm sick o' this! Buy the 1929 movie.--Richard T. Jameson