Adapted from the same source material as John Ford's 3 Godfathers, the Peter Kyne novel The Three Godfathers, William Wyler's Hell's Heroes does not share the same issues of preserving a major star's image to water down the film's story. The later film had to soften the three bad men at the center of the story because John Wayne played one of them, watering down the character journey to the point where the actual character journey was a bit thin. That's not a problem in Wyler's earlier adaptation where nary a movie star is in sight, allowing him to display the awfulness of the three men from the get-go, and boy are they awful. It's also Wyler's first full sound film, his previous, The Love Trap, being a part-talkie, allowing him far greater freedom to flex his technical muscles in this new era of sound.
Bob (Charles Bickford) is holed up in New Jerusalem, a small, remote, Western town with a bank, eyeing the score and waiting for his three compatriots to arrive. He antagonizes the sheriff, plays with the emotions of a young lady, and entices that young lady to get into a fight with another young lady before he heads over to the bank to rob it. Oh, he gets worse. Arriving just on time are his three fellow criminals. Tom (Raymond Hatton) and Wild Bill (Fred Kohler) head into the bank, killing the cashier, while Jose (Joe De La Cruz), waits outside with the horses. In the chaos that erupts from the robbery, Jose gets gunned down, taking most of the loot with him, while the three others get away into the wilderness of the desert. Heading straight towards a little well they know, they come across an abandoned wagon with only one occupant left, Mrs. Frank Edwards (Fritzi Ridgeway).
Now, this is the moment where we see how really bad these three men are. Aside from Wild Bill who opts out because he's dealing with a gunshot wound in his shoulder that saps all desire from him, Bob and Tom argue about which is going to...yeah...rape Mrs. Edwards first. They don't say it explicitly, but that's obviously what they're going to do when they argue about who gets to go first. The plan doesn't follow through, though, when Bob discovers that Mrs. Edwards is pregnant, but not only is she pregnant, but she's in the middle of giving birth. The film's major flaw is this section. For a 67-minute long film, this middle section around the wagon drags a surprising amount. It's the sort of thing that feels like got extra time in the edit because of this new-fangled sound thing, needing to give the audience as much as they paid for.
The sound is an interesting animal here, though. It really seems that, maybe, fifteen percent of this film had its sound captured on set. The stuff in the wagon was obviously done on a little, closed set and could have had sound captured here, along with a few other things, but most of the action has this distinct feeling that it was filmed silent and dubbed/foley to sound. There are early scenes in a bar with very specific sounds going on, the kind of thing that would register terribly on the regular microphones of the day if captured wrong, like from a single microphone above the set, without letting a particular focus. Add in the roving camera as well as the fact that a lot of the dialogue in that scene is done at medium to long distance, allowing for greater latitude in matching voice to mouth during dubbing, and you've got an intelligent use of the limitations of sound at the time that only allowed for a single, non-mixed soundtrack at a time. Another thing is that there are a lot of outdoor scenes that also include moving cameras on dollies and no place to hide the bulky, wired microphones, and you've got a recipe for very specific and precise post-production sound to make it work at all, and it works really well. Mouths match to the dialogue shockingly well to the point where if I didn't know about the early limitations of sound, or notice obvious signs of wind that don't get picked up, I could have sworn that it was captured on the day.
Anyway, the three take this newborn baby, name it after themselves, and decide that the only thing to do is to take it back to New Jerusalem, a plan of action made all the more important to Wild Bill and Tom because they shot the baby's father, who was the cashier at the bank. The film never loses sight of an opportunity for some comedy where it can when the two reverse their positions on which killed the man and which missed him when the extent of the crime reaches them morally. It's a character-based bit of comedy that helps lighten a heavy mood, and it's much appreciated.
The three men have different levels of relative goodness about them. Wild Bill can quote the Bible and offers up a baptism to the baby. Tom wants to do the best he can, reads the book about caring for a baby they find, and does what he can. Bob, however, wants nothing to do with the child, but he ends up going along with the other two for unclear reasons. That's not a criticism of Bob as written. He's a hard man who's prone to violence and sexual assault, but he's not bad all the way through. He can't be bad all the way through if the story is to follow where it goes, so he ends up going along with his other two pals despite his protestations.
The trek back to New Jerusalem is filled with iconography with one dying beneath a tree that looks like a cross and another leaving the camp in the middle of the night after leaving a note about "going to find a fella" in the desert in order to help preserve the little water they have left for Bob and the baby. In addition, the remnants of the group get back to New Jerusalem on Christmas Day, delivering a baby to the town on the day that Christ was born. It's not the most subtle thing in the world, but it draws less attention to itself than it could, offering up the images without any real comment from anything else. I think the lack of a musical score really helps sell these images, to be honest, instead of needing to underline them with musical stings that try and draw attention to them, just in case anyone didn't notice the huge cross that dominates the left half of the frame at one point.
So, Hell's Heroes is a really interesting counterpoint to 3 Godfathers. I wish Wyler had been able to make this a few years later when sound technology and convention had been a bit more settled because he might have been able to straighten out that second third of the film in a way that felt less flabby and as a showcase for how the movies can talk now. The use of actual bad men as the three godfathers to a helpless baby in the desert creates a much stronger emotional journey for the path they take, and I do think this is the ultimately the better of the two adaptations (of course, there are a few others that I haven't seen in addition to this pair). Still Wyler continues his winning streak early in his career with a hard film that includes great performances from everyone involved, especially Bickford as the central character Bob, while finding a way to make complex sound design with simple tools and continuing his use of great images to help heighten the dramatic power of what's going on.
This Wyler fella, he's got some talent, is what I'm sayin'.
