CABLE TV REVIEW : ‘Three Bad Men’ Returns on Z

“Three Bad Men,” screening Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday on the Z Channel, is an early, and extremely rare, gem by one of America’s greatest film makers, John Ford. Though few audiences have seen this movie in the over half-century since its 1926 release, organist Gaylord Carter has here contributed a new score, not really an exceptional one, but enough to move the film beyond the cadre of Ford aficionados and scholars who have kept its reputation alive.

“Early” is the operative word. Ford was only 32 when he made “Three Bad Men” in 1926--though he’d already directed over 50 other movies. And, superficially, it’s a typical ‘20’s western.

For some, the staging will seem stilted; the love interest coy. Others will marvel at the lasting power and beauty of Ford’s landscape shots and the furious impact of his action scenes.

Simple or primitive as “Three Bad Men” may first appear, it’s infused with a mighty theme: The surprising nobility of society’s outlaws and outcasts, in this case, three stage robbers and horse-thieves who sacrifice themselves unselfishly for a persecuted young heroine.

Ford, like William S. Hart before him, completely reverses the usual iconography of the western. The villain is a handsome, smiling, impeccably turned out sheriff in a white hat. The heroes are three scruffy, unshaven, glowering bandits in black hats--played by the singularly unsavory trio of Tom Santschi, J. Farrell MacDonald and Frank Campeau.

This theme of the noble outlaw or outcast is a Ford touchstone, linking films as seemingly dissimilar as “Stagecoach” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Informer” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” It’s an idealistic theme. It suggests that society’s conventional judgments are erroneous, that appearances are meaningless, that virtue is often its own reward, that true nobility depends not on words but deeds, and that history is a kind of quicksand whose truest meanings are never apparent.

“Three Bad Men,” is full of idealism and humor, action and romance. It also has one of the most rousing, roaring spectacle scenes in any Ford movie: The staggering recreation of the Dakota land rush, with hundreds of wagons dashing madly across the screen, dust flying, horses charging and a baby pulled from their path at the last second in a terrifying low-angle shot.

Ford was an entertainer but he was also, as Orson Welles once said, “a poet, a comedian.” “Three Bad Men,” after half a century, gives us his poetry and comedy undiluted and pure.