Dressed for Duress

Studios would take still photos of their actors in costumes to test the look of the wardrobe; here, we see Jane Wyman in one such test as Warner Bros. decides on dresses for her character, Ann Kincaid, in the Raoul Walsh-directed Cheyenne. Wyman, then Mrs. Ronald Reagan and an Academy Award nominee for The Yearling, came to Sedona in April ’46 to film under duress. A year later, she was a Best Actress Oscar winner for Johnny Belinda, he was in his first elected post as president of the Screen Actors Guild, their marriage would be ending – and Cheyenne was still unreleased.

Love, the Second and Third Time Around

Chill Wills

Max Evans' 1960 novel The Rounders, filmed in Sedona by director Burt Kennedy and released by MGM in 1965, was the first of a trilogy of books following the antics of ne'er-do-well cowpokes Ben Jones and Marion "Howdy" Lewis. Neither sequel was ever made into a movie, but the Jim Ed Love character originated by foghorn-voiced actor Chill Wills, reappeared in 1998’s The Hi-Lo Country, directed by Stephan Frears. Based on Evans’ 1961 book, Sam Elliott took the part of Jim Ed. The Rounders spun off a 1966-’67 ABC-TV series with Ron Hayes and Patrick (son of John) Wayne taking over the roles originated by Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda. Chill Wills returned as Jim Ed Love.

Correction, Please

His baby blues made playing a full-blooded Native American a concern when Burt Lancaster came to Sedona in ‘53 for Robert Aldrich’s Apache, but what really upset his vision was a failure to see eye-to-eye with the studio on a “happy ending.” Adding insult to injury, United Artists claimed Apache was filmed entirely in the “High Sierras” (as claimed in the trade ad above), ignoring its six-day detour to Sedona.

Morgan Woodward Revisits 'Firecreek'

Firecreek gang Morgan Woodward, James Best, Jack Elam, and Gary Lockwood.

During his 2005 visit to Sedona, I caught up with perennial movie bad guy Morgan Woodward, who is best remembered as Cool Hand Luke’s “man with no eyes.” Woodward reminisced about 1968's Firecreek (partly filmed in Sedona) and its stars, Henry Fonda and James Stewart, as well as his moviemaking career.––Joe McNeill

JM: Let’s talk about Firecreek.

MORGAN WOODWARD: I just saw a copy of the local press and they quoted me saying it was “absolutely the greatest cast I ever worked with.” Well look at the cast, for God’s sake. This started out as, I think, a CBS-Warner movie or something like that; and there was Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Jack Elam, Inger Stevens, Jimmy Best and on and on and on. You know, I looked at that cast and thought, “Jesus, I’ll be lucky to get billing above Glen Glenn Sound!”

They [Stewart and Fonda] were two top leading men; of course, at that time they were in kind of the sunset of their careers. Except Fonda came back real big with Katherine Hepburn in On Golden Pond [winning his first and only best actor Oscar in 1981]. They were old friends but had worked together in a picture only once before, and that had been many years earlier. They were available at that time and that’s the reason they got to work together. And I got to work with them.

How did you get into films?

With Walt Disney, in The Great Locomotive Chase. There was a great part in it, this wild-ass Confederate Master Sergeant––a bad guy––who threatened James J. Andrews, who was played by Fess Parker. Fess and I went to the University of Texas together, we were fraternity brothers. Fess told Walt, I know a genuine redneck that can come out here. He’s an actor, he’s been on stage before, he can do that part. Walt told him to have me come test for it. I did the test and got it, and then did two more pictures for Disney. That was 1955.

Do you have a favorite role that you’ve done?

Well, I would say my favorite roles were on Gunsmoke. Of course, Cool Hand Luke was an absolute giant step for me. I think it was Bosley Crowther in The New York Times who wrote ‘Morgan Woodward may be the only actor since Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda to get an Academy Award for never speaking a word.’ If you remember, she couldn’t hear or speak in that. So that quote made it into the trade papers.

One more question; I read somewhere that your uncle was a doctor and that he delivered Tex Ritter, the singing cowboy and John Ritter’s father. Is this true?

Uh huh. All my uncles were doctors. You know Tex Ritter’s real name? It was Woodward Ritter. Tex Ritter’s father named him after my uncle, Dr. Samuel Andrew Woodward, who delivered him. Let me tell you how im­pressed John was with that. His dad got the Golden Boot award posthumously. I’d never met John before and I walked up to him and said, “John, my name’s Morgan Woodward; my uncle, Dr. Samuel Andrew Woodward, delivered your father.” He said, “Oh.” Then he turned and walked away. Sometimes I’m surprised at the reaction I get from people.

Brand Renewed

Max Brand’s Singing Guns first appeared in a weekly pulp magazine, Western Story, serialized in six installments between Dec. 15, 1928 and Jan. 19, 1929.


In 1938, it was published as a novel.

Returning to its pulp roots, a Singing Guns movie comic book was published in 1950 to tie-in with Republic’s partly-filmed in Sedona movie adaption.––Joe McNeill

How to Stampede

Stampeding hundreds of wild horses for a movie is a piece of cake, right? Spook them with the sound of a sharp bang and away they go. But how do you stop the rampage once it has started? For an answer, check out this fascinating article from the January 1933 issue of Popular Science magazine that reveals the amazing amount of intricate planning it took to run a herd through northern Arizona’s remote Blue Canyon for King of Wild Horses, a long-forgotten outdoor adventure filmed by Columbia Pictures as Wild Horse Stampede.

Blue Canyon, located on what is today the Hopi reservation, was no stranger to the rumble of thundering hooves. Paramount staged a cattle stampede there for the Zane Grey silent Sunset Pass, which was released in 1929 and starred granite-jawed Jack Holt. Later on, rampaging horses raised the dust of Blue Canyon for Universal's  Stormy (1935) and Hoppy’s Texas Trail (1937).

Popular Science put the number of horses running amuck in King of the Wild Horses at 1800, but a Flagstaff newspaper report claimed it was a slightly more manageable stampede of just 700 broncos. Hyperbole aside (the higher number probably originated with an overzealous Columbia PR flack), the article will be of interest to anyone curious about what goes on behind the scenes of movies. You can read it in its entirety at Popular Science’s Website:

http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=yCgDAAAAMBAJ&pg=32&query=wild+horses

By the way, despite the unsubstantiated claims of a few amateur “movie historians” (and IMDB), there is no evidence to prove that any King of Wild Horses filming took place in the Sedona area.

Blake Edwards: That’s Life!

Cattlemen Karl Malden, Charles Grey and William C. Bryant (rear) go gunning for sheepherders – and maybe a few MGM suits – in Wild Rovers.

Screenwriter/producer/director Blake Edwards, who died December 15 at age 88, was known as much for his battles with studio executives as he was for the movies he made.

His feud with MGM began with the 1971 western Wild Rovers, which photographed scenes at Sedona, Flagstaff, Monument Valley and 46 other Arizona locations. Edwards maintained that he conceived the film as a “classic Greek tragedy,” but after the studio arbitrarily chopped 40 minutes from his cut, it left nothing, he lamented, but a prototypical cowboy movie.

“There was no discussion; an integral part was simply removed” Edwards griped to The New York Times in 1972. “If I take a chair and remove one leg, you still have a chair,” he said to rationalize his anger with the tampering, “but it won’t stand up, will it?”

Blake Edwards

Ten years later, Edwards was still steaming over the way Wild Rovers was manhandled by MGM, telling Playboy magazine in 1982, “I’d survived what was done to Darling Lili, but what happened to Wild Rovers really broke my heart, because that was the first time I began wanting to say something in the same way that 10, S.O.B. and Victor/Victoria would all become personal statements. Up until then, if somebody wanted a TV show about a slick private eye, I’d come up with a Peter Gunn or a Mr. Lucky. And if somebody wanted a movie director whose work had a certain gloss or sophistication, he’d get me to do films such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Operation Petticoat. I’d never consciously tried to do anything different until I wrote this tragedy about two cowboys who stick up a bank and are eventually hunted down and shot to death. William Holden and Ryan O’Neal played those roles, and we went out and made a very fine movie –– and then James Aubrey, who’d just become head of MGM, personally destroyed it. Aubrey took about a two-and-a-half-hour film  and cut out something like 40 minutes by changing the ending and a lot of the relationships. The sad part of the whole thing was that we all enjoyed making it, and I’d become convinced I was back on the road to having autonomy on my films and to making good money again.”

But Edwards had the last laugh on MGM. Most of Wild Rovers’ deleted footage was restored for the film’s 1986 home video release, which resulted in a critical reevaluation of the film’s many merits. Unfortunately, Edwards’ cut of Wild Rovers, which can be seen occasionally on Turner Classic Movies, has yet to be released on DVD.––Joe McNeill