Film review: 3:10 to Yuma (1957)

This is an interesting little movie.  It's based on a story by Elmore Leonard (who wrote a lot of Westerns before switching to the thrillers he's better known for now) and Glenn Ford is the bad guy.  The good guy is Van Heflin, who is, to be blunt, funny-looking.  The basic idea is that Van Heflin, a poor farmer suffering through a drought, takes up the offer to escort Glenn Ford's outlaw leader (who was caught because he dallied in town to have a quickie with the sexy barmaid)

to a small town to catch the titular train to a town with a jail.  It's rather a talkie Western, with Glenn Ford (whom I've never really liked as a hero, but who works pretty well as the devious villain (with a soft center)) getting a lot of good lines as he wheedles and manipulates Van Heflin's stoic and decent farmer, who is only doing this to get $200 to pay for water rights so his cattle do not die of thirst.  Meanwhile Ford's gang is looking for him to spring him before he gets on the train.  Initially they are put off the trail by a switcheroo that the (pathetically small and old) posse does, where Ford is removed from a stagecoach and replaced by a decoy, but it doesn't take long for them to locate Van Heflin, his assistant (the doomed comic-relief town drunk, played by another one of those "where have I seen him before" actors, and the owner of the stagecoach that Glenn Ford's gang robs at the beginning of the film (who is putting up the $200). 

(Ford also shoots both his own man and the stagecoach driver dead, so he's not exactly Alias Smith and Jones.)  A solid portion of the movie is spent with our heroes and the villain cooped up in a hotel waiting for the train.  (As Leonard said in an interview that came with the movie on Criterion Channel, a friend said that the movie was basically "3 hours and ten minutes past High Noon".)  The tension is effectively ramped up (as the town drunk meets a grisly fate and every recently-recruited townsperson suddenly decides he has important things to do elsewhere, and to complicate matter, Van Heflin's wife comes into town looking for him).  So the climax (as seen in the poster) is Van Heflin trying to get to the train through all of Ford's gang members. 

This leads to a rather unexpected denouement, that I'm not sure I like but that I won't give away.  (Apparently the 2007 remake is even more extreme.)  Oh, and one important extra point: it has a cracking theme song!