Every director should make at least one Western. It’s as simple as that. I don’t care if they’re in vogue or out, whether they make money or not. If you hope to be worth a damn behind the camera, you need one Western under your belt. Landscapes, violence, sweat, grit, faces with evil intentions or grimy fear, moral peril. It encourages you to use every last damn bit of your frame and start seeing things from an ethical perspective, as opposed to just moving your characters around a stale plot like so many chess pieces. If you can make one, you can make any other kind of movie you set your brain on. There is more than one reason to mourn the latter-day death of the Western. Guys like Sergio Leone were the last guys who thought big and didn’t crop and truncate their images for that all too lucrative home video market.

James Mangold is now officially worth a damn. I won’t bestow Grand Master privileges on him just quite yet, because he did after all inflict Kate & Leopold on us. But 3:10 To Yuma finds Mangold at his best and most composed. This is a film that takes its time, lets us get to know the people and the situation, and only reveals to us what the movie is REALLY about in the last half hour.

3:10 To Yuma is a remake of a 1957 film starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin (beloved by many, unseen by me) which itself was based on an early short story by the great author Elmore Leonard. After getting his foot shot off in the Union army during the Civil War, Dan Evans (Christian Bale) hopes to take up ranching in Arizona, which is made difficult with a drought and a railroad dispute over his land. His wife (Gretchen Mol) is disappointed in him and his oldest son William (Logan Lerman) was never appointed with him all the way to begin with, to get to the “DISappointed” stage. He may not even like or obey his father all that much, but he is awash with hero worship for an outlaw named Ben Wade, upon whose exploits many dime novels were written.

We find that Wade, (Russell Crowe) however, is not all that worthy of worship. He leads his band of thieves on a wagon robbery, putting down innocent men, even one of his own, like dogs. He is apprehended in Bisbee and Dan finds himself as one of the men assigned to escort Wade to the small town of contention, where he will be taken by train to the penitentiary in Yuma to await his death sentence.

But I’m merely telling you what happens. 3:10 To Yuma is so damned old fashioned that it’s actually new. Every event that happens, every line of dialogue that passes through conversation, every bit if development is used to build and build to a pay off, which is something you don’t see nowadays. In this age of instant gratification and movies based on dolls, you don’t see slow-burn writing anymore.

3:10 To Yuma is far and away the best acted film I’ve seen so far this year. Of the wonderful assembled lead and supporting cast that features Luke Wilson and Alan “Wash” Tudyk, I can easily spot four actors that deserve Oscar consideration. Granted there’s Bale and Crowe, but there’s also Peter Fonda as a craggy Pinkerton who’s been on the job and tracking Wade for more years than he cares to count. I’m amazed that Fonda has truly gotten better with age, with wonderful performances in Soderbergh’s The Limey and hands down being the only good thing about that Goddamned Ghost Rider movie. He seems weathered, left out in the sun too long, and far away from the point where he accepted nonsense.

The other supporting standout is Ben Foster as Wade’s second-in-command, Charlie Prince. He seemed to have fully developed his character without any assistance from the script whatsoever. Prince sprouted whole from the ground up as an apparent former southern dandy who found out, one way or another, that he liked killing people one day. I can’t imagine casting agents not knocking down his door after this one, because he can seemingly just direct himself. HE’S BACKSTORY IN A CAN!

Crowe as Wade is like an Oat Opera Hannibal Lecter, who knows just how to manipulate and feel out any situation and find all the weak spots in another human being. I very much admire how Crowe can pack Ben Wade to the gills with everything charming, but nothing redemptive. Bale as Dan, meanwhile, is so pervasively watchable for the exact reason that he is not trying to draw attention to himself. Bale is one of those precious actors who can wring a symphony out of a few low keys. Hopefully his work here will get the attention that his stellar work in Empire Of The Sun, American Psycho, The Machinist, Batman Begins, and The Prestige somehow failed to get him. This is like the Heat of their generation, were they not relegated to just one scene together.

It has been a good long while since I’ve seen a movie so much in touch with the heart of its genre as 3:10 To Yuma is with the Western. Good Westerns perpetuate the old myths while the great ones debunk it. What makes Mangold’s film so wonderful is how fully it illustrates what made the Western so great in the first place. We had to look deeper. Interior values are all these characters have. Why do we do the things we do and avoid the things we don’t? So the law won’t punish us? Those who roughed it in those days didn’t have such present wrist-slappers on hand. They were on their own against the elements and the sheer hostility of their fellow man. Everything depended on who they were and not what they did.

It was, is, and could be again the only genre in American movies where the soul is more valuable than gold.

***1/2 out of 4
Rated R
Directed by James Mangold