Dallas
Directed by Stuart Heisler 94 mins (1950)
Gary Cooper – Blayde “Reb” Hollister
Land, a family, a future. They’re “dreams, fried up, short order” for Blayde Hollister (Gary Cooper). Rightly or wrongly, this ex-Confederate from Georgia has waged his own war to settle past injustices. Now he’s a wanted man. And he can feel the law closing in on him. Posing as a Boston dandy, he comes to the boom town with a gun and a plan: to smoke out the notorious Marlow brothers (including Steve Cochran and Raymond Massey), then give ’em a whiff of gunsmoke. Director Stuart Heisler (Along Came Jones) keeps the pace flowing like the local saloon’s liquor. Max Steiner’s score gallops like a hell-for-leather posse and screenwriter John Twist fires scene after scene with lines like “you’ll get your pockets picked in a graveyard”. Dallas, here we come!
Also starring Ruth Roman, Steve Cochran, Raymond Massey and Barbara Payton
Reed Hadley played the part of Wild Bill Hickok in this film. Gary Cooper starred as the same character in "The Plainsman" (DeMille, 1936).
Maria’s Notes
Dallas was made as one of a group of films the studio offered my father with not much leeway in choosing yeah or nay. It was a Western between two non-Westerns - Bright Leaf, based on a true tobacco family drama and Distant Drums, that dealt with not the American West but the Seminole Indians in Florida. Getting “back in the saddle” was something my father was always comfortable with, but an actor/artist always wants to stretch his own limits and feel he’s moving in new directions, honing his craft. Was he able to do that in Dallas? I don’t know, he never spoke about it and I suspect, as Picasso said, “I learn from the paintings that don’t work.” Maybe to study Dallas, one can see what spurred my father to move on and bring other elements to his roles in Westerns.
Maria Cooper Janis