The Tall Men

Directed by Raoul Walsh, this western follows two brothers discharged from the Confederate Army who sign on for a cattle drive from Texas to Montana, running into raiding Jayhawkers, angry Sioux, rough terrain and bad weather along the way. Starring Clark Gable, Jane Russell and Robert Ryan, it was made during the stretch when Gable had gone freelance after his decades long MGM contract ended. His agent's deal with Fox gave him a four hundred thousand dollar advance, ten percent of the gross and, if the film cleared ten million dollars, a one million dollar bonus that was extraordinarily rare for the era, and at twelve million the film cleared it. Unable to find locations that could pass for 1860s Texas, Walsh moved production to Durango, Mexico, where four thousand head of cattle were assembled, the largest herd used in a film to that point. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times dismissed it as a badly beaten mixture of tired western cliches, though modern assessments praise its widescreen photography and production values as among the year's most enjoyable westerns. Who it's for: Fans of big budget 1950s widescreen studio westerns and Clark Gable's later career. Who it's not for: Anyone seeking the genre's darker, revisionist entries may find this too classical and predictable.