Arizona (1940)

Wesley Ruggles' Arizona is a typical Hollywood colonialist Western epic that thinks "taming Indian territory" is something to celebrate. Jean Arthur is the central figure in this plot, and she is intent on settling in Arizona and intent on Arizona itself becoming settled. Arthur is a kind of figure for Arizona itself as she settles down with a man and exchanges her jeans for dresses and gets married. Ok, so much for themes.

In the plot, Arthur plays a young capitalist wants to get the biggest ranch in Arizona. For a while she is swindled and outwitted by another capitalist (Warren William), but she meets William Holden – who was dreamily cute in 1940 – and settles down with him, after getting the biggest ranch in Arizona. There is lots of shooting (mostly off-screen or in longshot because of the PCA) and there are cattle drives and explosions and big crowd scenes. Ruggles handles all of this well, but the tone of the film is entirely off. Victor Young's score constantly tells us we're watching a comedy. So even when Arthur kidnaps her rival and brings him to her house and holds him at gunpoint – a moment when one might suppose we were supposed to be taking her seriously – we're given lighthearted comic music to tell us not to worry at all. This is all in good fun.

Numerous people are murdered by the film's villain, and in one of the film's final lines we are told that Arthur's character is steel from her topknot to her toes or some such drivel, but there's never really any danger here at all, and Ruggles reminds us that throughout the film so much that I never believed there were any stakes in this little colonialist fantasy at all. As for Arthur, who is perhaps the great comic actress, she's totally miscast as a serious action heroine here, and this makes the whole thing even more comic. She squeaks her way through the script's dangerous sequences, and only really lights up when she's playing romance or at the film's very end when she's called upon to be a strong wife/potential widow.

In any case, Arizona didn't work for me at all.