Jubal, the first of three Western collaborations between Glenn Ford and “great outdoors” director Delmer Daves, is a roundly effective movie, and in a sense of the word that shouldn’t scream faint praise. This Wyoming-set cowpoke thriller—now available in a rich, moody 2.35:1 transfer—follows a ménage-a-quatre in the middle of “10,000 acres of loneliness.” Wanderer Jubal Troop (Ford) is adopted onto the ranch of Shep Horgan (Ernest Borgnine), a coarse, happy, homely guy who follows his every earthy innuendo with a knee-slapping, wholehearted giggle. There’s immediate tension between Jubal and Horgan’s top hand, Pinky (Rod Steiger), but the real problem is the boss’ wife, who he boasts of as a “Canadian heifer”—Shep can’t talk about women without bringing in the cattleman metaphors. Fine, feline-featured Mae (London-bred Valerie French) is a would-be aristocratic, Mme. Bovary-type whose enunciated Public School English sounds more foreign against the raw Great Plains backdrop than Mandarin Chinese. Potential for tragedy is implicit every time she cringes with hate at her undomesticated-but-doting hubby. Jubal’s no well-bred gentleman, but his self-contained quietude makes a pleasing contrast to Shep’s ruddy, overflowing vitality, and this stranger picks up on Mae’s discomfort, so she sticks after him. Jubal won’t betray the kindness of his employer and friend, but he’s sorely tested, and Mae's tenacious. This isn’t even the first time she’s looked for gratification from the hired help—Pinky (!) came before, and his sparked jealousy drives one of the most dirt-sleazy scenes I’ve seen lately: the pudgy redneck confronts Mae in a barn that’s just been vacated by Jubal; her seduction attempt has flopped, but she’s furtive, and he pounces on it. “I suppose you needed some wood?” he drools, “If you needed some wood, you used to ask for me.” Think it can’t get any more sweat-and-bad breath? Just wait until Pinky tells Mae he’ll go to Shep and “describe fully your little bag of tricks.”

Borgnine and Steiger were coming into this movie with still freshly made reputations, both owing a lot to Paddy Chayefsky’s mensch romance Marty —Steiger had starred in it on TV and Borgnine on the big screen. It was self-consciously serious, important material, and the artistic caché that both actors were carrying marks Jubal as no B-list oater but belonging to the category of respectable “psychological” Westerns. Looking back on these movies—the most vaunted examples being Anthony Mann’s Fifties collaborations with James Stewart, what’s most striking is the boldfaced, often awkward way that they’d foreground their protagonists’ mental vicissitudes. Hollywood came late to Freud, and the early results of his influence have a novelty naiveté that’s often less psychologically sophisticated than more innate, older material. An Ernie Kovacs skit spoofing the highbrow reinvention of cowboys-and-indians, featuring a gunslinger getting the talking cure from a stereotypical goatee-and-round glasses Viennese psychiatrist, gets the cornpone pretension of the Adult Western just about right. And so we get a silly, badly-integrated subplot where Jubal romances an immaculately-coiffed blonde (Felicia Farr) from a traveling wagon train, taking advantage of their first moments alone together to spit out a backstory full of overly on-the-nose self-analysis (hated by mother, lost his beloved father figure, substituted Shep, etc.) that neatly bundles up the story arc while filling in the blanks.

Steiger’s Pinky thankfully never gets a big on-the-couch moment—as the vindictive, porcine hillbilly, the actor just oozes his drawl, seemingly in a dry run for his consummately bizarre peckerwood brogue in The Run of the Arrow. Pinky’s full of petty human evils—who needs to know where they come from?—a pear-shaped brat with a naughty, puckered smile, and it’s his and Mae’s combined frustration that spurs a really rough-to-watch killing. If you can stomach the Psych 101 motivation, this is what makes some of these ambitious Westerns so special; when best friends Shep and Jubal go for their guns over needled insecurity, or when Jimmy Stewart’s Lin McAdam slakes his revenge-lust at the deflated anti-climax of the gun-fetishizing Winchester ’73, we get something singular in action movies: the ashen taste of violence with human consequence.
—NICK PINKERTON