One of Hollywood icon Gary Cooper’s favorite films was The Hanging Tree (1959), his daughter Maria Cooper Janis told me after its recent screening, wrapping up a fest in her father’s honor at the Southampton Playhouse where he would watch films with family.
It’s easy to see why he loved the film. It’s beautiful and real and, “He liked doing Westerns that were ‘real,’” said Maria.
The author Dorothy Johnson, like Coop, a Montanan, captured “the real feeling of the West,” said Maria — which is also on display in her other works The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and A Man Called Horse (1970).
Filmed on location in Yakima, Washington, in the rugged outdoors Coop luxuriated in, it is set in a camp along the Gold Mine Trail in Skull Creek. It’s 1873 Montana — “the brass knuckle fist of America, a territory and a torch burning half with pride and half with whiskey, a hot flame that burned at the greed and lust of man,” the trailer blares.
“They came here from all over the world, except this man (Dr. Joseph Frail) with his terrible temper. This man came from nowhere.” Dr. Frail, played by Cooper, has “frail hope” in the wake of a mysterious tragedy, thus his pseudonym.
He arrives in town with his six-gun and medical bag, to seek gold, heal patients, and escape his past. From his perch just above the town’s center teaming with fortune-hunters, he now has to deal with one unfolding drama after another shaped by Montana’s unique alchemy.
The matter-of-fact and plucky Oscar-nominated Western musical score by Max Steiner, who also scored Casablanca (1942), perfectly reflects Frail’s predicament.
“Sometimes there is something very warm in his eyes,” says the resolute Swiss immigrant, Elizabeth Mahler, played by Maria Schell, herself from Switzerland. An exile from Nazi Germany, Schell was the older sister of Maximilian Schell, who won a Best Actor Oscar for Judgment at Nuremberg.
“And sometimes,” she says, “I think he always be a stranger. He has no friends and he wants none.”
“I’d say he had his reasons,” Cooper says. “And those reasons make Joe Frail the kind of guy you don’t run into very often, except maybe in the Montana territory where there was no law and there were no badges and the only thing that kept people respectable was the hanging tree.”
“What makes you think you can play with people’s lives?” asks Schell. “It is very cruel the way you draw them near then turn them away if they get too close. Someday life will do it to you.”
Known for playing unambiguous American heroes like the title role in Sergeant York (1941, Cooper portrays the more complex Dr Frail — not unlike his character, Marshall Will Kane, in High Noon (1952), both roles garnering him a Best Actor Oscar.
He just loved Westerns evident by the fact he starred in 25, including The Virginian (1929), his first "talkie," and The Westerner (1940), along with 14 silent Westerns in which he played largely un-credited roles — representing nearly a third of his 119 films across all genres.
“The obvious traditional Western is all black and white,” said Maria. “The bad guys are bad, the good guys are good, you know who the hero’s supposed to be and what’s supposed to happen and what he’s supposed to do. And, there’s no conflict. He’s not human somewhere.” But, both these characters — Will Kane and Joe Frail — “are flawed human beings who suffer human weaknesses.”
Karl Malden plays the loathsome prospector (“Frenchy Plante”) like nobody’s business. That he had played a saintly priest in On the Waterfront (1954) five years earlier shows his range and outsized talent.
“My father admired Karl’s acting so much, really enjoyed working with him colleague to colleague,” said Maria. But the relationship took some easing into. One day Malden walked off the set after a scene “muttering under his breath, looking very, very distressed.” So the producer Dick Shepherd asked him, “Mr. Malden, what’s the matter?” He wouldn’t budge. “And, Dick said, no please, please tell me what’s the matter and Malden sort of stopped and shook his head and looked at him. ‘That Cooper, he said, you know, you can’t overact, you can’t underact around him. You just got to say your lines and get off the set.’”
Cooper was the pro. He just became the part. Early in his career, everyone would shake their heads after a scene saying, he’s doing nothing. Then, they would look at the rushes and, as A.C. Lyles, Paramount Pictures legend, told me, “The screen just lit up with him” — revealing his charisma and naturalness.
Then, too, Maria Schell’s performance was nothing short of brilliant. “Of course he loved Maria Schell,” said Maria. “Who could not love Maria Schell?” And, George C. Scott (“George Grubb,” fire-breathing preacher) gave a masterful debut performance.
Foreshadowing the film’s end, Frail, intent on controlling his past and those around him, comments as he’s about to help a woman in labor, not on the wife but her nervous husband, saying: “It’s funny about a man. It’s funny. He lets a woman get such a hold on him.”
In the end, Elizabeth does just that at great cost to her and Dr. Frail who finally bows to love. “To really live you must almost die,” the theme song rings out as the hanging tree becomes “a tree of life.”
