Austrian refugee Dr. Karl Braun (Charles Coburn) and his daughter, Leni (Sigrid Gurie) are invited to come and work in the rural farming town of Asheville Forks, North Dakota. Greeted at the train station by farmer John Phillips (John Wayne) and his veterinarian uncle, "Nunk" Atterbury (Spencer Charters), the Brauns are horrified by the bleak conditions in this dust bowl-ridden community. Disease overwhelms the town, the air is thick with swirling sand, and everyone lives in shack-like homes where even inside a thick layer of dust covers everything.

Leni desperately wants to leave ("How can anyone live in such filth?" she rudely asks aloud), but Dr. Braun's dedication keeps him busy, and their stay is prolonged after he decides to operate on a crippled boy (Sonny Bupp) in a leg brace. (Bupp was already a veteran of such roles, having also played a crippled boy in the 1937 Three Stooges short Cash and Carry; he later played Charles Foster Kane III in Citizen Kane.) Eventually, Leni falls in love with John, but the dust storms only get worse, and the entire town, some 200 residents, decides to move to Oregon, where more obstacles await them.

John Wayne's popularity was rooted in towns very much like Asheville Forks. The cheap, seven-day Westerns he made in the mid-1930s were popular in rural America and that's where Duke stardom first rose. In this sense Three Faces West directly targets that audience. Once Wayne became a major star in the 1940s, he straddled both the A- and B-pictures world, making big movies for other studios while Republic Pictures kept him busy with mostly unambitious programmers. Three Faces West is a major exception.

By Republic standards the film is quite lavish, and one of its strengths is the authentic feel to the dust storm scenes and their aftermath. The film integrates some actual dust bowl footage, but mostly uses a mix of impressively bleak, dust-covered backlot streets and extremely good Howard Lydecker miniatures to create its vividly oppressive atmosphere. The cumulative effect is such that one can almost taste the dirt.

Wayne also has an especially good and varied role. Early scenes require him to be both embarrassed by the conditions he, as the town's representative, are asking the Brauns to endure, yet also maintain an upbeat attitude in their presence. The dust storm sends entire the town fleeing to Oregon, and his character takes charge of the exodus, a responsibility he doesn't want, and of which he quickly tires. The romance aspects are more conventional, though it does anticipate that in Casablanca in some respects. Mostly though it's undermined by a forced cuteness because of the langauge barrier and John's colloquialisms. ("You just can't wait to beat it." "Beat it?" "Yeah. Scram.") Indeed, this is overdone throughout the picture: Nunk referring to Dr. Braun: "He may be a ferinner, but he knows his onions!"

The script, co-written by Austrian F. Hugh Herbert and Hollywood Ten blacklistee Samuel Ornitz (with Joseph March) strikes a mostly good balance of New Deal optimism with Steinbeckian pessimism and irony. (Director Bernard Vorhaus was also blacklisted.) Though Braun dedicates himself to serving his adopted community, he is never fully accepted by some who see him as an outsider. The Brauns are also thinly-coded Jews, giving some in the town a vaguely anti-Semitic air. This is most obvious in one scene where at a (Christian) religious blessing John eyes the Brauns standing quietly but obviously out of place while everyone else silently prays.

The picture has elements in common with John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, released four months prior to Three Faces West. The latter is more conventional, but the comparison in not inapt. Both share a grittiness that completely eschews Hollywood glamour. Both really look like they were made on the American plains, and are filled with deeply lined, working class faces that look like they were plucked off the streets.

Video & Audio

Artisan has been real hit-and-miss with titles from its Republic Pictures catalog, including their John Wayne titles. Some, like Wake of the Red Witch (1948) look terrific while others, such as A Lady Takes a Chance (1943) and The Fighting Kentuckian (1949) are barely watchable. Happily, Three Faces West looks very good, with a sharp image with good contrast that one routinely expects for a Warner Bros./MGM title, but not so here. It looks like Artisan did a straight transfer without doing anything either to the sound or picture. The soundtrack has its share of snaps, crackles, and pops, usually at reel changes and in one case there's a one-second dropout in the middle of a piece of dialogue. The film also has its share of tears and other damage, though none of this is especially distracting. For this reviewer, the sharpness and contrast give this a qualified passing grade. There are no subtitles.

Extra Features

Zip. Menu options are limited to "Play Movie" and "Scene Index." That's it.

Parting Thoughts

John Wayne lends his commanding presence to Three Faces West, but even had he not starred the film it would still be an interesting one. This reviewer can't think of a movie quite like it, and the vividness of its dust storm scenes and its unusual story keep it consistently interesting.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. His new book, Cinema Nippon will be published by Taschen in 2005.