‘The War Wagon’ Is a Victim of John Wayne’s Success
There are few stars that have a filmography as stacked as John Wayne, both from a volume and quality standpoint.
Whether you look at the 1930s or the 1970s, you can find a legitimately great movie with John Wayne top-billed without breaking a sweat.
The inevitable consequence of a deep and wide-ranging career is that a lot of excellent movies fall through the cracks and fail to find a place in the wider audience’s consciousness. One such movie is The War Wagon, which has such a no-brainer selling point that it’s shocking no one seems to care about it.
‘The War Wagon’ Features an All-Time Great Bar Brawl
The bar brawl is a core feature of many Westerns, and The War Wagon features one of the best. Sometimes the action can lean too far into humor (the mud-hole fight in McClintock! is a good example) or be completely devoid of it, but this particular brawl straddles the line perfectly.
There are broken bottles, broken chairs, broken windows, and a piano used as a weapon. The gag of someone walking into the saloon only to get punched in the face immediately is well-deployed. It’s really everything you could want from a bar brawl and highlights one of the best things about the movie – it’s just great fun.
‘The War Wagon’ Is Also a Great Heist Movie
Bank robberies, train robberies, carriage robberies, and, well, just about any kind of robbery you can think of are staples of the Western genre. However, very few Westerns should really be considered heist movies. It is perhaps an esoteric distinction, but something being stolen is not the same as something being heisted.
There’s a level of planning and guile inherent in a heist that separates it from a run-of-the-mill smash-and-grab or just pulling a gun on someone. You have to put a team together, devise a clever plan, gather the necessary equipment, and inevitably change all of that when something goes wrong. The War Wagon nails all of this, starting with a great putting-a-team-together sequence.
The team that Jackson and Lomax put together includes Levi Walking Bear (the casting of Howard Keel here is wildly offensive, but sadly a hallmark of the time in which it was made), who has “learned to live in the white man’s world and do what they do. Grab all you can, anytime you can,” a cantankerous old man and his far too young wife, and an alcoholic explosive expert (Robert Walker Jr.). They also enlist the help of a nearby Native American tribe that also wants revenge against Pierce.
Where things really get into a heist movie groove is when they run a bluff against Pierce to steal his nitroglycerine to blow a bridge, disguising this as nothing more than Jackson wanting some clothes in the ranch Pierce stole from him. It’s a ridiculous plan but with some of the pettiness already shown by Jackson, it makes just enough sense.
The high-stakes rigging of the bridge that is made possible by this scene is truly excellent, filled with tension as the highly unstable explosive is placed gently in the wooden beams below the bridge. When the heist is actually put into motion, it is kinetic and propulsive, and the explosion is spectacular. As is inevitable in a movie of this kind, things go awry. There is a double cross, another double cross that ends up helping, and spilled flour plays a shockingly large part in the overall resolution. It really could not be much more satisfying.
Leave a Reply