3:10 To Yuma (Blu-ray)

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Delmer Daves directed two of the most underrated Westerns from the classic period--"The Last Wagon" (1956) and ""3:10 to Yuma" (1957)--so it doesn't surprise me that one of them was recently remade. When it was first released, "3:10 to Yuma" was compared to "High Noon," and for good reason. Rather than lengthening shadows or ticking clocks sustaining a tension that served as an external reminder of the internal spring of a main character that was wound too tight, "Yuma" offered a date with destiny in the form of a train. Van Heflin played a decent man who needed $200 to save his ranch from drought, and so he took the assignment of escorting a notorious criminal (Glenn Ford) to town and guarding him in the hotel until it was time to put him on the 3:10 train to Yuma. As the psychological tension mounts, with outlaw Ben Wade trying to get inside Dan Evans' head, a train whistle sounds in the distance . . . then gets audibly closer, and closer. Outside, like dark clouds building for a storm, Wade's gang drifts into town and sets up shop so they can try to prevent their leader from getting on that train.

It's a simple story by Elmore Leonard that was published as a short story, but it has a strong storyline and main characters. Yet this remake, though less psychological and more action-packed, is at least as good as the original. In some ways, it's even better. Certainly many of today's viewers would find the first film too "talky" and welcome the additional plot twists, action, and characters.

And for a couple of guys from New Zealand and Wales, Russell Crowe and Christian Bale do a fine job of playing cowboy. Each brings depth to his character, and when you add believable Western action, intelligent dialogue (for the most part), and gorgeous cinematography, it makes for a strong Western film in any decade. Perhaps one reason that critics have been gushing "3:10 to Yuma" is the best Western since "Unforgiven" (1992) is that there's a touch of English Bob (as played by Richard Harris in that film) in Crowe's performance to remind them. He's fairly mesmerizing as the calm-but-calculated leader of an outlaw gang, while Bale as the rancher plays it with as much visible fear as bravery. Halsted Welles, who wrote the screenplay to the 1957 film, is credited here along with relative newcomer Michael Brandt, and there was only one exchange when the gang gabs it up in a bar when I found myself thinking, clunky. The rest was solid.

Curiously, you can see the influence of "Brokeback Mountain" at work. If Ben Wade's second in command, a hotheaded psycho named Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), was played any more flamboyantly, he'd be flaming. But he's the kind of psycho you love to hate, and when one of his gonna-be-victims calls him Charlie Princess, why, it's just so precious that you can't help but laugh and forgive.

Credit James Mangold ("Walk the Line") for the maintaining the spirit and central conflict of the original film, while still managing to accommodate a pretty serious (and sometimes hilarious) expansion. The original was 98 minutes long, while this one sprawls to 122 minutes. That could have been disastrous, but to Mangold's (and Brandt's) credit, the additions don't feel fabricated. Just don't think too hard or long about the state of prosthetics in the late 1800s. Bale's character is a Civil War vet who has a peg-leg that attaches to a stump of a leg he got as a war souvenir. As long as you go with the filmmaker's sleight-of-hand and focus on how he lost the leg, you won't notice that for the bulk of the movie (even when he leaps out of a window onto the street below) that peg-leg behaves like the real deal. There may be a hitch in his giddy-yup, but in reality Dan Evans' bad leg probably would have come off more than once.

As tropes go, it's also pretty familiar to have Evans' boy, William (Logan Lerman), think his father a coward, which is much more developed in this remake than it was in the original. I just reviewed "The Legend of Zorro" and saw basically the same thing. All that familiarity takes a little sheen off the luster of an otherwise strong film. Still, "3:10 to Yuma" is character-driven, and that's saying something. No matter how much action you add, if the characters seem as if their decisions and personalities are shaping the narrative, it's going to seem legitimate.