Movie review – Ladd #21 - “The Iron Mistress” (1952) **1/2

Alan Ladd became a star at Paramount but wound up clashing with the studio over a number of matters. Eventually like most big stars in the 50s he set up his own production company – called Jaguar – and set up his shingle at Warners. The Jaguar films played it safe – colourful actioners in the main, which certainly were a safe bet to start off with, but as the decade went on became less popular and reduced Ladd to a second-rate star.

This film has the benefit of an angle, being the biography of Jim Bowie, the famous Alamo defender and the person after whom the Bowie knife is named. So technically it’s not really a Western but a… Southern? A Western set in a slightly different time and place? A romanticized biopic – I think that’s it.

Warners allowed a decent budget (the production values are high – ball rooms, swamps, haciendas) and assigned Ladd one of their names at the time, the very pretty Virginia Mayo, to co-star – Mayo is actually one of Ladd’s best co-stars, gorgeous, not that sympathetic and very aggressive (which Ladd’s female co-stars need to be since he had a disinterested air when it came to dealing with women).

Part 1 of the story is about Bowie trying to make his way in New Orleans – he romances Mayo and fights a duel. Part 2 involves Bowie and his brothers trying to establish themselves as businessmen in Natchez Mississippi; they have to win a horse race and they have troubles paying up. Again, he romances Mayo (who by this stage is married to a no-hoper) and gets involved in another duel. (He also invents the knife.) Then he has to help out the husband of his true love, and gets involved in another duel. His true love shoots through so he escapes to Texas, which is Part 3 – he falls for a Mexican girl (Phyllis Kirk), but has to shake off Mayo and her dead beat husband (literally by the end) before marrying Kirk – and that’s it. No Alamo for this little black duck.

There’s one outstanding sequence: Ladd (with a knife) fights a duel with Joseph Calleila (who has a rapier) in a darkened room during a storm. There’s another exciting knife fight in act two – one of those ones where the two combatants have their wrists tied. But generally this film is far too long – it goes on and on, another duel another sequence with Mayo, for 110 minutes. And you feel cheated it doesn’t end at the Alamo.