Peter Travers calls the most recent 3:10 to Yuma deconstructionist rather than revisionist, claiming that “Despite kicking up the violence quotient… and freighting Freud into the subtext…, [director James] Mangold digs in his spurs as Dan takes on Wade’s gang.” Taking an opposite stance, Roger Ebert claims the film “restores the wounded heart of the Western and rescues it from the morass of pointless violence.” David Denby, on the other hand, calls the film “familiar,” not because it remakes the 1957 original but because it embraces conventions of the traditional Western, except now they have a harder edge. According to Denby, “3:10 to Yuma is a remake of a 1957 Western directed by Delmer Daves, and this version—directed by James Mangold and written by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, who amplified Elmore Leonard’s 1953 story and Halsted Welles’s script for the original—is faster, more cynical, and more brutal than the first.”
In spite of its nods toward the Iraq war, we agree with Denby’s assertion. The remake of 3:10 to Yuma merely amplifies conventions of the traditional Western. The original focused more intently on the dried up land, famished cattle, and the rain that finally comes.
For us, the remake also nearly erases the environmental history illustrated by the original 1957 version of the film. Instead, the 2007 version uses post-Civil War politics and railroad corruption and land grabbing as a backdrop for an exploration of the hyper-violence associated with the Iraq War and the Abu Ghraib scandal. The 1957 version from director Daves, on the other hand, places water rights and drought at the forefront. Although the Daves film also maintains conventions of the traditional Western, because it places water at its center, it more accurately highlights the environmental impact of both progressive and populist versions of progress.
The Daves version of the film foregrounds the desert conditions from its opening shots of a trail crossing an arid land and a stagecoach throwing dust up from its wheels forward. Although Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) and his gang rob a stagecoach, the lack of rain and its impact on ranching takes precedence for the Evans family witnessing the crime. Dan Evans (Van Heflin) laments three years of drought killing his cattle, and when his wife, Alice (Leora Dana), notes that Al Parker has a stream that won’t run dry, Dan explains that six months of water rights costs $200.00. His only solution seems to be the possibility of rain. He won’t, as Alice suggests, beg or borrow the money. When he looks at the land, however, he does go to town to borrow the money because it will get them through six months, and, according to Dan, “by then it will rain. All this will be green in six months. The cattle will be fat” and they won’t be tired all the time. They will be happy.
The drought affects every aspect of the plotline in the 1957 version. When Dan attempts to borrow money, the banker refuses to loan it to him because of the drought, for example: “What with the drought, nobody pays back,” he says. Dan chooses to help the sheriff capture Wade because of this drought, as well, tricking the desperado into staying longer at the bar to pay him for his and his boys’ work, and for his “tired cattle.” When they put Wade in handcuffs, Dan explains, “My cattle is dying. I’ve got to take care of them.” And when Mr. Butterfield (Robert Emhardt) offers $200.00 to take Wade to Contention to catch the train, Dan volunteers.
While they wait in a Contention hotel room for the 3:10 train to Yuma, Wade even uses the drought to convince Dan to set him free for a price: “Three years of drought don’t seem so bad,” he says and talks about a rancher surviving ten years of drought because a “big enough outfit had plenty of water.” With Wade’s $7000.00, Dan can build a big enough outfit to survive the drought. Dan of course refuses, but we hear thunder in the background when Alice rides into Contention wearing a white cape. We again hear the thunder as Dan and Wade walk out of the back of the hotel, and wind blows up along a fence line. After cattle roll by, Dan and Wade hide behind water barrels, another nod to the film’s central theme. And after Dan and Wade jump onto the Yuma train and wave at Alice waiting in her wagon, the rain begins, amplifying Dan’s success. Both the $200.00 for water rights and the rain will bring back the grasslands, feed his cattle, and save his family.
The 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma, on the other hand, mentions the drought only in reference to a debt Dan Evans (Christian Bale) owes for three months of water rights and medicine for his youngest son’s (Ben Petry) tuberculosis. Instead, as Peter Travers explains, the film “kick[s] up the violence quotient (a gatling gun figures in a coach robbery) and freight [s] Freud into the subtext” while reinforcing the original film’s “moral code.” The film weakens Dan’s character as a way to update the film and connect it with the current Iraqi situation, but it valorizes messages about civilizing the West similar to those in the original. Here environmental history is nearly erased to highlight a post-Civil War setting constructed as parallel to Iraq and Abu Ghraib.
Connections with the Iraq War are emphasized throughout the film. Dan lost a leg in the Civil War not as an enlisted man but as a Massachusetts militiaman conscripted into the Army, and he, like National Guard veterans, fights for his benefits. Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) is tortured with electric shocks outside a railroad tunnel when he is caught after escaping Dan and the rest of the posse, paralleling the torture endured by Abu Ghraib prisoners. The hyper-violence throughout the film connects the two wars, as well, as does the references to the railroad as the source of Dan’s woes, rather than drought.
Nonetheless, the 3:10 to Yuma remake reflects the ongoing debate about the environment of the American West. Worster even suggests that “one of the surprises of our time is that people have begun to acknowledge their continuing dependency on nature wherever they live” (Under Western Skies 252), including the American West.
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