Great Day in the Morning (1956)

Jacques Tourneur brought a European intelligence, literacy and seriousness to his Hollywood westerns.

This 1956 Civil War film is strikingly set on the eve of the war, when the tensions rip apart early Denver but the cataclysm still hangs in the air. The film ends as the war begins, the Union civilians slip into uniform and the War shifts from words into killing. But Denver on the eve of the war catches the fear of division more familiar to 1950s Europe than to the American popular screen. 

Robert Stack’s Owen Pentecost is an unusual Western hero because he is completely selfish, an unheroic hero before the genre crawled with them. He’s a Southerner with none of the history, values or pretences of the Old South gentleman. He’s Rhett Butler without the charm. 

The few Southerners in this rabidly Unionist town plead for and expect his support but as he admits, he is only out for himself. “Sure, I'm loyal. I've got an undying loyalty to myself and no one else, nothing else.” In the climactic struggle for the gold to finance the rebels’ cause, he undertakes to help them only if they pay him $200,000.

The hero’s name is doubly suggestive. The Owen suggests a cypher, an O, zero, a man hollow at the core. He’s also someone incurring debts — he’s owing. He carries two debts in particular. 

After killing a miner in a duel over a contested claim he conceals his responsibility and informally adopts the miner’s young son, intending to raise him in his own values (self-preservation, gunplay, etc.). In the key gunfight Owen is wounded trying to secure the boy’s safety.

His other key debt is to the bar-girl Boston Grant (Ruth Roman), who betrays her corrupt boss/beau Jumbo Means (a swollen Raymond Burr) in a poker deal that gives Owen Jumbo’s gambling and mining empire. She loves Owen and he takes her but is drawn away to the more innocent blonde Ann Merry Alaine (Virginia Mayo). 

That romantic tension echoes that between Katy Jurado and Grace Kelly in High Noon (1952), the archetypal pull between Experience and Innocence. The parallel emphasizes Owen’s vacuity in contrast to the integrity of Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper) in the earlier film. Where Jurado represents Mexico, though, Boston’s name represents the civilized East, which sets her above the crooked man of Means. But Boston is only her name; it’s Ann Merry (!) who comes from the East with her trunks of women's fashion to civilize the West — and to try to make Owen honest. Ann’s love for Owen is continually checked by her moral revulsion at him.

Owen holds back from Boston on the same principle of icy selfishness:

“I don't belong to anyone except myself. I'm not joining any parade - yours or theirs. I like walking alone - no ties. Don't ask questions; no one to answer to. Man's gotta be sentimental to fight a war; gotta have a lump in his throat about God and country and home and mother, all the pretty things.[Takes a drink, and looks at Boston] No lumps.” 

Their love will inevitably be a casualty of the war. Boston asks, “Owen, if there's a war, I'm North, a Yankee, you're South. What happens to us?” He replies “I shoot you, I guess.” But he doesn’t have to. After falsely claiming to bring her to the boy, Means murders Boston before she can learn Owen loves her. She dies, his debt to her unpaid. All he could tell her was “I'll remember you as long as I remember anything.”

Then there’s that Pentecost, as odd a surname/label as the silver screen sagebrush ever offered. The name evokes revivalist Protestantism. Christianity is what Owen essentially lacks, what the Zero and Owing of his name replace. In this respect the neutral Owen is like both sides of the Civil War boiling over in the town: the lynch-mob Unionists and the equally destructive Confederates. They all serve themselves and their strictly secular values at the cost of humanity. The Unionist’s vituperation abandons all sense of Christian brotherhood — and loses our sympathy: “I can smell a Southerner a mile off. Smell I don't like. Nor the breed. High and godly, slave-trading, slave-beating rebel secessionists. Not fit to live, none of you. Sorry we saved your worthless hide.”

The town’s other striking character is the Catholic priest, skirts and all. Father Murphy (of course, he has to be Irish) strikes a balance between his religion and the town’s secular needs. He’s killed when he steps between the town’s warring factions in the saloon. But as the priest falls and the war erupts, Owen is drawn out of his selfishness into more humanist values. 

Owen’s growth appears in three stages. He tells the boy he killed his father, disillusioning him to keep him out of the war. He helps his South compatriots and then suspends his fee as payment for the wagon he’ll use to escape. Finally, he asks the Union captain to tell Boston he loved her: “Love is never a word that came easy to me.”

This humanity prompts the captain to let him escape. As one hatred provokes the other, one humanity does as well. This double transcendence of the conflict explains the film’s Revivalist title, Great Day in the Morning, the new dawn of salvation. Captain Gibson provided a more domestic version of the overriding human community: “The North and South are natural enemies - like husband and wife.” The division conceals — but threatens — the deeper union.