3:10 to Yuma (1957)

USA, 92 minutes
Director: Delmer Daves
Writers: Halsted Welles, Elmore Leonard
Photography: Charles Lawton Jr.
Music: George Duning
Editor: Al Clark
Cast: Glenn Ford, Van Heflin, Felicia Farr, Leora Dana, Henry Jones, Richard Jaeckel, Robert Emhardt

It's interesting to watch virtually back to back the two movie versions of the 1953 Elmore Leonard story, "Three-Ten to Yuma," made 50 years apart out of the same story—indeed, the same screenplay, as Halsted Welles (who died in 1990) gets first writing credits in both. Many of the same plot points and even scenes and lines of dialogue recur in both. Yet they are two rather different films. The 2007 remake is a remake, first, hallmark of a metastasizing trend of the 2000s (and counting), patching in state-of-the-art action stylings by expanding a good deal, and not unsuccessfully, on the story's middle section. The original eschews a lot of the fancy set pieces of the remake, no doubt in line with budget considerations, instead focusing on the story much more as suspense chamber piece with Rod Serling-level ironies of human foible.

For anyone interested in treatments of Elmore Leonard stories they are a particularly interesting pair, both coming from outside of the '80s and '90s bubble, when Leonard may have been coasting a little on the superstar status he enjoyed. (I need to see Get Shorty and Out of Sight again but I remember them now as bloated and self-satisfied and was definitely underwhelmed.) Both versions of 3:10 to Yuma, however, are worth seeing I think (and then, with me, it's on to catch up with the FX TV show Justified, which I suddenly realize I have been hearing good things about for years now). But if you only have time for one—and I know how that goes, life is short after all—then this 1957 version is your pick. The usual spoiler disclaimer verbiage goes here.

3:10 to Yuma (2007)

USA, 122 minutes
Director: James Mangold
Writers: Halsted Welles, Michael Brandt, Derek Haas, Elmore Leonard
Photography: Phedon Papamichael
Music: Marco Beltrami
Editor: Michael McCusker
Cast: Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Logan Lerman, Dallas Roberts, Ben Foster, Peter Fonda, Alan Tudyk, Gretchen Mol, Kevin Durand, Luke Wilson

It must be said first, I think, that there's a lot of pure competence on display in this latter-day remake of the classic '50s Western, right down to screenplay, performances, editing—even folio work. I was surprised by how compelling it can be and by how well it sustains that, having brought low expectations with me to yet another Hollywood recombinant DNA project. But it's also light on inspiration, signaled most obviously by the fact that it's a remake, which if not a fatal flaw nonetheless remains a burr in the saddle.

Based on an Elmore Leonard short story from 1953 (published originally in "Dime Western Magazine"), the story is a finely tuned instrument: a desperately impoverished rancher volunteers to join a militia delivering a very bad man to a train (the 3:10 to Yuma of the title), which will forward the very bad man on to prison. But the very bad man's gang, possessed of prodigious abilities, wants to prevent this from happening. The tension is established early and never really lets up, even as the ending enters into bizarre and unbelievable realms with various narrative problems.

52 Pick-Up (1974)

52 Pick-Up is Elmore Leonard's 11th novel but most of those before this—inimitably Leonard as they may be—had been Westerns, and here he is still feeling his way into various particulars of the suspense/thriller crime genre. He's not always on his game entirely, but I still count it as one of my favorites, with 1980's City Primeval, perhaps because there's something of the energy of discovery to it (or perhaps because they are the first two I read). Maybe it's my imagination, but I get a stronger sense here than usual that he is positively relishing the work of pungently capturing the textures and feel of Detroit in the early '70s, with the bad actors going casually day to day dealing drugs, porn, call girls, grand theft auto, basically whatever it takes. As always, one of the bad actors is very, very bad. It must be fun to dream these guys up and send them on their rounds. Here it's a blackmailing plot by a trio of ne'er-do-wells that morphs into an episode of kidnap and appalling treatment of our hero's wife—even as our hero, a Vietnam vet natch, coolly plays the bad guys off one another like a chess master up against the whole town at the local library on a Saturday afternoon. The wife even gets a supporting role as typical flinty, clipped-speech Leonard hero too, and that may be the kindest thing Leonard gives us in regard to her once the mayhem is fully engaged and events are unfolding like fate. Leonard actually has two great gifts, which are related but don't often enough come together. First, what he's famous for, his language is so refined and boiled down it is virtually transparent and so fun to read that at points I find myself laughing out loud at how good it is. Second, he knows how to structure a plot. He doesn't concern himself overly with anything new—criminy, he started out writing Westerns, perhaps the most conservative of all the literary genres, and they're all pretty conservative. Leonard's stock-in-trade tends toward some combination of revenge plot and damsel-in-distress. But the way he picks up the cards, shuffles them, and deals—he's always finding a new direction to come at you, and more often than not you never see it coming. I can't think of any better place to start or finish with Leonard than right here. Go ahead, you can skip a night of sleep.

In case it's not at the library.

City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit (1980)

Elmore Leonard is a writer everyone needs to look into sooner or later. Anyone who cares about good writing owes it to oneself—he's easy to read and amazing at his craft, his words literally hard-boiled down to pebbles and rocks of meaning washed bone clean by narrative momentum. His dialogue, in particular, can make a fascinating study, as he simply takes out the words that people don't say and leaves only the rest, which is remarkably different from how most people reconstruct conversations, even in memory, let alone writing it down. Yet the lines ring like fragments of melody. "Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip," is how he puts it in advice to writers. Leonard started out writing westerns (day job writing advertising copy, maybe that's how he got so pithy), then moved on to crime novels set in Detroit, in Florida, and finally in Los Angeles. He might even have one or two set in New Orleans now. Most people's favorites by him seem to be the first one or two they've read. I'm no exception there, and for that reason probably as much as any I tend to favor his Detroit novels, of which the subtitle here makes obvious this is one. That subtitle also underlines the lasting influence westerns have had on Leonard, both the ones he wrote and the ones he read and saw at the movies—the profound influence, indeed, that westerns have had on crime fiction generally (and American detective fiction particularly). Raymond Chandler's man going down a mean street, after all, has always been basically just a 20th-century urban update of certain species of frontier stories. Here Leonard simply elaborates on that, as much as he ever "elaborates" on anything, with a nerve-jangling confrontation between a depraved, soulless criminal, a young kid named Clement Mansell, aka the "Oklahoma Wildman," and Raymond Cruz, the Detroit homicide investigator who is determined to take him down. Mansell is enough like Billy the Kid, and Cruz enough like Gregory Peck, to make the overriding conceit work just fine. And Leonard never has to spell anything out in even that much detail. He just sets the players in motion and lets things roll; the subtitle is there for the clue. The landscape is quickly littered with victims and potential victims, including perhaps most memorably Mansell's own attorney, the hard-as-nails Carolyn Wilder. It can get to be a pretty rough ride, but at least it doesn't take much more than an airplane flight, or single late night, to polish off.

In case it's not at the library.