After the resounding success of John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924), the Fox Film Corporation entrusted the director with another epic Western, based on the novel Over the Border by Herman Whitaker (1867-1919), a British writer who emigrated to Canada and then California. 3 Bad Men was one of the few Fox projects that allowed Ford freedom of action, including command of the screenplay, shared with John Stone, in which the setting and historical background are completely changed. While the novel is set in northern Mexico during the Revolution of the 1910s, the film’s narrative takes place in South Dakota in 1877, where a vast area – abandoned by the Sioux after their defeat by the U.S. Army and confinement to reservations – was assigned to thousands of settlers from the East Coast and Europe (as well as adventurers and outlaws) who were attracted by the recently discovered gold mines.
The film was originally planned as a vehicle for three Fox stars – Tom Mix, Buck Jones, and George O’Brien – but as the first two were unavailable, the production company had the young O’Brien play opposite three older actors cast as the “Bad Men”: Tom Santschi, J. Farrell MacDonald, and Frank Campeau, outlaws who take advantage of the confusion created by the mass arrivals of land-seekers, but reveal themselves as men with hearts of gold, helping an orphaned girl and protecting her with an almost chivalrous sense of honour in that violent frontier world, ultimately sacrificing their lives to save her and her fiancé (George O’Brien) from a sheriff who is actually the leader of a dangerous gang. The trio are the outsiders frequently found in the films of John Ford, treated with sympathy and a sense of comedy, here entrusted especially to Santschi and Campeau.
During the making of 3 Bad Men the director was relatively free to choose locations, especially in Wyoming and the Mojave Desert. The natural beauty of Wyoming had attracted Hollywood production companies since the 1910s: Fox filmed Oscar Apfel’s The Man from Bitter Roots (1916, starring William Farnum) in the Cody area; Famous Players-Lasky used the region for two epic Westerns, The Pony Express and The Thundering Herd (both 1925); and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer set W. S. Van Dyke’s War Paint (1926) there. 3 Bad Men was shot in Jackson Hole, the magnificent valley dominated by the majestic Grand Teton chain and crossed by the Snake River, which in those years was beginning to emerge as a tourist resort, and which had already been used by Fox in Emmett J. Flynn’s The Yankee Señor (1925, with Tom Mix and Olive Borden). A novel location here was Lucerne Dry Lake in Southern California’s Mojave Desert, seen as the race for land allocation unfolds over a vast flat expanse that enabled the hectic movement of hundreds of extras, horses, and carts. This spectacular sequence proved that the young John Ford (in solid partnership with cameraman George Schneiderman) could compete with the celebrated race for the free lands of Oklahoma in Tumbleweeds (1925, the last film by William S. Hart), and it bolstered his reputation for location filmmaking.
The advance preview of 3 Bad Men was not successful. Fox then imposed numerous cuts before officially releasing it on 28 August 1926, but even in its revised form the film had only a lukewarm reception. Considered more broadly, this reflected the public’s response to epic Westerns, and very soon thereafter the genre was abandoned by the great production companies. Ford himself was also involved in these changes, and for 13 years he did not shoot other Westerns until his masterpiece Stagecoach (1939), whose celebrated sequence of the stagecoach chased by Geronimo’s Apaches was filmed in Lucerne Dry Lake, a location that would become a significant connecting element between Ford’s silent Westerns and his talkies.

Carlo Gaberscek

 

The Score  As a young man I was brought up in two rather old-school American universes, as a conductor and as a composer. By the time I was 26 when I got my first principal conducting position, a large portion of my repertoire was the first modern generation of American symphonists, many of whom were still alive, and a handful I knew personally. Composers like Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, and Walter Piston were all students of Nadia Boulanger in Paris before they began forging that new musical branch of the “American Symphony”.
Today the film scores we all associate with Westerns were in fact born and developed in the concert halls, and adapted by mostly European film composers to great effect. Unfortunately there are nearly no original scores for silent-era Westerns, and most musical settings were either left to local musical directors or by the studio’s distributors. The first specially commissioned new score for a Western was written by the great Hungarian-born composer and conductor Ernö Rapée for John Ford’s The Iron Horse in 1924. But in reality the musical language we commonly associate with Westerns was not developed until well into the 1930s, some 10 years after the advent of sound.
Therefore my aim was to tap into those signature colors of the 1930s, and try to give the film the benefit of what was to come just a few years later: a maturely developed and symphonic impression. As 3 Bad Men was (and still is) my only score for a Western, I thought to revisit my own personal experiences in this repertoire and apply the methods I’d learned in melodic and rhythmic structure, and especially in quartal harmony. My hope is to support Ford’s landscape, without getting in the way of the story.

Timothy Brock