Destry Rides Again (1939)

Destry Rides Again is on every list of canonical Hollywood comedies. A lot has been written about its peripheries. How it influenced the comedy Westerns that came after it, most notably Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles. How it saved Marlene Dietrich’s career. The steamy romance between Dietrich and Jimmy Stewart during filming. Producer Joe Pasternak’s and writer Felix Jackson’s notion to reverse the gender formulas of classic Westerns. How it achieved an elegant balance between, and redeemed the honor of, the cliches of raucous comedy and the sacrificial melodrama of Westerns. Wes Gehring has catalogued the many and varied formulas that it parodies without descending into pastiche.

It’s less common to read about it as a great piece of cinema. Many of the Paramount and Universal comedies of the time worked to synthesize the sensibilities of the exiled European directors, actors, screen writers, and cinematographers that worked at the studios with the conventions and energy of action-oriented American filmmakers. Some of the strange allure of Destry Rides Again is that its seemingly all-American genre virtues are skewed by some not-quite-American imaginations. Casting Marlene Dietrich as the saloon queen Frenchy is the most obvious. The decision was the great Hungarian-born producer Joe Pasternak’s idea from the get-go. In the same year that Lubitsch was courting Garbo to do her first comedy, Ninotchka, for Paramount, Pasternak was courting Dietrich, then living on the Côte d’Azur, to come out of her involuntary retirement to do her first Western. Arguably, it would also be her first sustained comedy. Lubitsch had cast her in Desire in 1936 (he handed directing duties over to Frank Borzage, not a natural director of comedies), and then directed her himself in Angel a year later. For the first half or so of Desire, Dietrich displayed elegant comic chops; after that the comedy tailed off into a romantic crime melodrama. Angel can hardly be called a comedy at all, and her performance lacked energy entirely. The film failed so miserably that it sealed her famous fate as “box-office poison.”

Dietrich is reported to have been incredulous when Pasternak was offering her a comeback in two genres that she had rarely been seen in and had little experience with. But in his days as head of Paramount in Berlin and Vienna, Pasternak had seen the young actress in comic situations and knew her personally to be witty and funny. It was a bigger stretch to have her play a honky tonk floozie in a Western. But that, too, made sense to Pasternak, who as a kid had been a devoted reader of Karl May, the most popular writer of pulp Westerns in the German cultural zone, and he knew that Dietrich had also been a big fan when she was young. Add to all this that the story and most of the script was written by Felix Jackson, Pasternak’s longtime associate in Berlin, who had also devoured Karl May’s books. (So did my father, fwiw.) This project of key players, who all could and did converse with each other in German and reminisce about what would later become known as May’s “Sauerkraut Westerns,” is an important piece of context for the film, and an element in its originality. For all the popularity of May’s books and iconic characters throughout the German-zone, very few films were made of them in Germany. (The situation changed mightily in the 1960s, when many adaptations of the May universe were made in both East and West Germany.) In fact, the thriving pre-War German film industry made very few Westerns, period. I think it’s significant that though these German film-exiles in Hollywood loved Westerns, they had never made any. The Universal duo of Pasternak and Jackson had established their reputations by producing and writing most of Deanna Durbin’s enormously successful films, and these films were always heavily inflected with Central European style. Pasternak claimed he was inspired to make Destry Rides Again because he wanted to free himself for a while from Deanna World. In a classic structuralist set of reversals, instead of planting a beautiful young singer in a quasi- (and sometimes real) European setting, he would plop one of the world’s sexiest and most gorgeous European stars, with her famous sprechstimme singing voice that could barely cover an octave, in the most American movie setting imaginable.

Even if they are puzzled by Dietrich’s presence, or Mischa Auer’s Boris Stavrogin, few commentators on Destry think of it as the work of foreigners. Its fantasy West is 100% congruent with the Hollywood genre. The film was made for Americans, and though it was a risky undertaking given Dietrich’s reputation and history, it was supposed to make money. That’s the other piece of the synthesis. George Marshall was hired to direct and Hal Mohr, one of Universal’s most accomplished and experienced cinematographers, to manage the cameras. Both men had long experience with making Westerns. Apparently, Jackson’s script wasn’t completed when filming began, and much of it was improvised on set by Dietrich, Marshall and other members of the team. Like many Hollywood masterpieces, its energy comes from an ensemble that’s having great fun on the fly.

So let’s get into the film’s beauties. First, the fight scenes. More accurately, brawls. The donnybrooks are central to the movie’s theme. Tom Destry (Jimmy Stewart) has been called to the lawless town of Bottleneck to create order after the previous sheriff has mysteriously disappeared (he was killed at the behest of Kent [Brian Donleavy], the town’s headman, who runs the Last Chance Saloon). To the surprise of the current sheriff, reformed town drunk Washington Dimsdale (Charles Winninger), who called Destry expecting a Gary Cooper type manly gunslinger like Destry’s father, Destry eschews violence and has hung up his guns. His pacifism elicits mockery from the town’s various ne’er do wells, until it becomes clear to him that he needs to hoist his pistols again to protect the townsfolk and avenge the killing of his friend, Sheriff Dimsdale. The simple contrast between violence and nonviolence gradually morphs into one between righteous and unrighteous violence. The narrative can be parsed through a series of confrontations that threaten to become violent but are usually prevented by Destry’s mix of sly persuasion and backbone. For all its humor, few Westerns include as many tense confrontations as Destry Rides Again.

It’s part of the film’s genius that the private confrontations are steps on the way to larger, social ones, donnybrooks that both contain and relieve the personal tensions. There are three famous brawls in Destry. The first, funniest, and briefest, occurs under, and immediately following, the opening credits. It’s a wild night in Bottleneck.

The second is the most famous of all, the epic catfight between Frenchy and Lily Belle (Una Merkel), one of the most famous girl-on-girl melees in film history. Technically, it’s a private fight, not a social one. The friction between Lilly Belle and Frenchy over Boris (Mischa Auer) is peripheral to the main plot, though not to its theme. In terms of the plot, the whole thing is just a confection. But what a fight! Marshall had intended — according to both Merkel and Dietrich — to eventually substitute stunt doubles to complete the tussle, but the actresses agreed to finish the job themselves, even though they hadn’t rehearsed or blocked it. Instead of the inexorable fistfights between alpha males that Westerns were addicted to, the film gives the honor to alpha females. And instead of women breaking it up in the name of peace and civility, it’s the ostensibly testosterone-challenged Destry who quells the fight with a bucket of water — bringing Frenchy’s fury on himself. By the time she’s done throwing glassware and furniture around, all the saloon’s he-men cowboys are cowering behind tables and under the bar.

The women’s brawl is Destry Rides Again‘s most remembered scene, even though it occurs only a third of the way into the movie. But its significance surfaces in Destry‘s climactic set piece, the attack of the phalanx of Bottleneck’s women on the villains holed up in the Last Chance. Kent has been acquiring neighboring properties for himself by cheating the homesteaders like Lem Claggett, and using his criminal gang to intimidate and kill anyone who stands in his way. When Sheriff Dimsdale is shot dead by henchmen springing one of their own from jail, the townsfolk have had enough. Destry organizes a big posse to attack the Last Chance where Kent and his gang have barricaded themselves. It’s a blazing standoff, until the town’s women, armed with rakes, hoes, poles and paddles storm the building. The assault is unexpected. Kent’s men can’t shoot the women and the army of hausfrau Maenads wins the day. In this Western, the women are the alphas.

There’s an elegant irony in Lilly Belle emerging as a warrior-leader, not Frenchy, who, fearing that Destry will be killed, desperately tries to prevent the battle from taking place. Frenchy is suppressed and expelled from the company of women, where she never really had a place, in any case. Her day as a dominatrix is done, the victorious townswomen never had any use for her, and she has turned away from Kent — her romantic transformation from cynic to lover has undermined her power. She must be sacrificed for the town to save itself from evil men. The magic of her knock-down-drag-out battle with Lilly Belle marks the magnitude of her loss. (A double bill with High Noon would be most instructive.)

Another of Destry Rides Again‘s narrative beauties is the constant motif of reversal, or, more aptly for a comic Western, the motif of backfire, which plays out obsessively — or, if one prefers, mythically — on both granular and global levels of the film’s story-world. Although we suspect at first, and then are shown, that Destry is a dead-eye shot with a pistol when he wants to be, for the most part he’s not a “straight shooter.” He yields little of himself directly, usually employing humorous roundabout anecdotes to reveal his thinking. And these anecdotes basically all have the same moral: bad intentions backfire, especially violent ones. In one, a man who believes that his guns will protect him from evildoers shoots himself in the foot. In another, a man who wanted to change the course of his life as an opera singer to working in cement falls into cement and becomes a building’s cornerstone. In a third, a man named Stubbs kept threatening to shoot people’s heads off, and had his own blown off because of it. A fourth tells the age-old story of the parenticide child who asks the judge to have mercy on a poor orphan. These Will Rogers-style homilies are clearly part of Destry’s strategy of righteous one-upmanship, warnings about the need to stay on the straight and narrow. But in one of the funniest scenes in the movie, as soon as Destry begins yet another tale about a fella he once knew, Frenchy wrests the whole kaboodle from him, and tells a far more interesting, and ribald, tale about a man she once knew in New Orleans who always ate a hundred oysters before visiting her. (Wink wink!) Once he found an enormous pearl (that’s good!), but, even though he had been warned not to eat oysters in July, the oyster was bad and he died. Frenchy ended up with the pearl. Reversal 1: Frenchy tells a better anecdote than Destry (and it’s sexy!). Reversal 2: the absurdity of eating so many oysters (presumably for an impressive sexual performance) leads to finding a pearl (sure, why not? the odds must have been in his favor). Reversal 3: But he died from it. Reversal 4: And Frenchy got the pearl (instead of whatever else “the fella” had in mind). And of course there’s what we might call The Prime Backfire: Frenchy has stolen Destry’s tactics to tell, not some unassuming homespun wisdom, but a lusty Boccaccioan tale that has the same moral: before you act, consider the backfire. It might get complicated.

Every important character in Destry experiences a backfire. Lem Claggett (Tom Fadden) is so sure of his hand in the opening poker game at the Last Chance that he bets his property, and loses it to the cheating Kent aided by Frenchy. Kent elevates the town drunk Dimsdale to be the new sheriff, thinking that he will be too wasted to uphold the law; but Dimsdale promptly swears off the sauce and summons Kent’s future nemesis, Destry. Dimsdale, for his part, expects that Destry will be a stone-cold avenger like his father, and gets the gunless son instead. Boris, like Claggett overconfident in his hand, loses his pants to Frenchy; this leads him to steal Destry’s pants, which in its turn leads to Destry making him a deputy and an acomplice in Kent’s (and Frenchy’s) downfall. Frenchy’s backfires are many, so here’s just a couple — she tries her seductive moves on Destry, and instead he makes her see her cynicism and dishonesty more clearly; in the climax, in full melodramatic mode, she tries to save Destry from Kent, and instead dies in Destry’s arms from Kent’s bullet. Destry, tragically, renounces guns as a defense, only to have his friend, Sheriff Dimsdale, shot down. And hidden in the mix, Lily Belle leads the women’s phalanx to victory, overruling the isolated Frenchy who tries to prevent the women’s march, even though Lilly Belle lost her catfight to Frenchy. Finally, Bottleneck’s women take revenge on the criminal men, securing the victory of virtue and feminine vengeance.

A third beauty of Destry that leaped out at me during my most recent viewing is the extraordinary acting by the two stars and the even more extraordinary genius (or maybe serendipity) of casting them in a narrative that suited them so perfectly at that point in their careers. I’ve read that Gary Cooper was originally offered the role of Destry, and Joel McCrea was also considered, as late as 1938. I suspect that these offers were made for a different script than Jackson’s final one, in which Destry’s character would be closer to that of the 1932 Tom Mix version, a reticent, sharpshooting man’s man bent on revenge. It may not even have been a comedy. (The original wasn’t one.) I haven’t been able to locate a production history of the film. Not sure one exists. I haven’t found any statements by Pasternak or Jackson about when and why the script took the form it ultimately did. We know that Pasternak courted Dietrich out of retirement specifically for the film. We know that Jackson’s previous screenplays were all comedies. We know that the script wasn’t finished when shooting began. The film we have now may have been shaped specifically for Dietrich and Stewart. (I’ve read in a couple of places that the Universal brass were skeptical of both stars, Dietrich for her recent boxoffice track record and Stewart because he seemed too soft and cuddly to play a cowboy-lawman hero. Not Gary Cooper enough.)

The pairing of two such dissimilar stars must have made sense to Pasternak. The former mega-star on her way down and the adorable young actor who had just broken through that year with Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington would plausibly give each other cachet. But it was still a pretty audacious idea. And it’s hard to imagine two actors with more opposing approaches to acting. Dietrich came out of what we might call the “posturing tradition” of acting. Every aspect of her appearance and delivery was crafted to create the impression of an impenetrable surface. Her beauty was a radiant barrier, a display. Her strange voice uncategorizable. Her deliberately inexpressive singing barely musical, as if she were an automaton, uninterested in feeling, other than perhaps ironic wit. Her sexuality was not “ambivalent,” certainly not “fluid”; it was as if it was an act, a performance, a through-line, not a source of pleasure. It was clear that her characters in her early films had inner lives, but they were inaccessible, distant. Audiences were held at arm’s length. What they got was a display. In the critic Andrew Sarris’s words, “surfaces become essences.” Her reputation as Sternberg’s creation reinforced this sense of her being a gorgeous puppet. (Pasternak said that under Sternberg’s tutelage she had become “a mannequin.”) She became masterful in manipulating lighting and camera to convey her obligatory paradoxical image, radiant, artificial, alluring, impenetrable. All of that changed with Destry Rides Again.

For his part, Stewart had been a fairly uncomplicated actor before Destry. He was often considered an intuitive actor who tended to take, or be given, roles that came naturally to him. It was so natural, it seemed like he was acting himself. Well-heeled, sincere, gallant, unpretentious, empathetic, strong but self-effacing, oscillating between cheerful sincerity and moody righteous indignation. And he was fluid. He grew a lot under Capra’s direction, even receiving an Oscar nomination for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the last film he made before Destry. But for me, much of his new expressiveness in that film is over the top, as if he were exaggerating what he considered to be natural, forcing effects instead of designing affects. (I think that description holds for Made for Each Other and the awful It’s a Wonderful World, two other films Stewart made in 1939 immediately before Mr. Smith and Destry.) Destry was the first role he received in which he had the power as a lead actor to be the center of power in the narrative. He is given a range of powerfully conflicting feelings that he has develop toward a conclusion. After the explosions of Mr. Smith, Stewart learned to modulate. To put it simply, whether because of the script, or Marshall’s direction, or Dietrich’s presence and guidance, he learned to act a complex character in a position of power. As for Dietrich, she was given, and took full advantage of, the opportunity to be entirely free of her pantomime past. In no other film before Destry does she play with such passion, flexibility, and energy as in Destry.

What could be more magical, and appropriate? The story and the film are precisely about the frictious demands of freedom and discipline. When we first meet Frenchy, she dominates everyone but Kent, for whom her dominatrix character is a tool. She simply doesn’t care about anything but her power — mainly over men, who are hobbled by their residual respect for women and their fear of the Kent-Frenchy axis, but also women, as proved (temporarily) by her barroom victory over Lily Belle. She’s a honky tonk version of the femme fatale we are familiar with, but with a euphoric comic edge. Out in the West, she gets to revel in her feminine power. Her power is so great in that space that she seems ahead of everybody in the phallus game. Her only dependence is on Kent, whose cynicism she gladly accepts because… well, that’s where the power is. When Destry arrives, almost immediately Frenchy’s phallic power is disturbed. Comically, not by Destry at first, but by Lilly Belle, who basically challenges her to a duel by catfight. But the really disturbing disruption eventually does come from Destry. It’s when he tries to cool the women down by dousing them with a bucket of water that Frenchy goes into free-form fury.

I really wish we had a more detailed description of how the Furies’ barroom brawl was filmed. Dietrich not only had no recourse to all her on-set mirrors to monitor her appearance or to arrange her postures, there was certainly no time or leisure to check them if they were actually there. The marmoreal mannequin of screen legend lets it all hang out, no poses are held, no camera is transfixed by her mere presence, no seductive dispassion, she’s a wild she-wolf who’s a danger to every living being. For the first time in her cinema career, Dietrich the actor forgets herself. And it’s right that she should. Frenchy has begun to free herself from the cynicism and dishonesty, not yet because of Destry’s attractions, but, following the rule of backfire that pervades the story, it’s because of Destry’s act of cooling her down, just as that act backfires on Destry. She’s now even hotter than before, and Destry has to retreat, holding the lioness at bay with a chair, as Frenchy vaunts like Valkyrie.

The story unarguably establishes a good old bourgeois, American melodramatic trajectory, as Frenchy’s developing passion for Destry conflicts with, and finally overcomes, her dispassionate enjoyment of power. In our terms, she abandons her phallic power in order to join Destry’s — a bad choice for her, because Destry’s can’t protect her. In the course of her progress, she oscillates between her cowgirl performance and her New Orleans whorehouse madam posture. When she’s in the latter, Destry has the power. He actually allows himself to physically interfere with her, smearing her makeup and making her feel guilty enough to examine herself in a a mirror.

Structurally, Destry Rides Again has a classic design as old as the hills. The two lead characters follow an X-shaped pattern of intersecting vectors: Destry’s an arrow on its way up, Frenchy’s an arrow on the way down. At stake is the relationship between two notions of power, goodness and strength, and, as in all Westerns, what each one means in a world defined by violence. Destry basically starts morally pure, strong in his commitment to nonviolence. He never wavers in his “goodness.” He’s not in danger of being corrupted morally. His challenge is to retain his goodness while having to also manifest strength, by accepting the need to fight evil violence with righteously violent “law enforcement.” The discipline of the law is more important than his personal code. The humor, and originality, of his character is that his personal code — one of the Western hero’s core character qualities — appears so mockably out of place. Much of the comedy comes from the mockery of Destry’s phallic inadequacies. Our first glimpse of him is as an excessively nonchalant, homily-spouting whittler in a stagecoach, alongside the two-fisted, hotheaded macho cowboy Jack Tyndall (Jack Carson). (The scene may be a sly allusion to John Ford’s Stagecoach, which was released earlier the same year, the film that established John Wayne as Gary Cooper’s successor as the archetypal manly cowboy.) The impression that Destry is precisely not John Wayne is reinforced when he steps out of the coach carrying a parasol and birdcage (belonging to his fellow-passenger, Tyndall’s sister Janice, as the audience knows), his neckerchief tied in a bow. Both his patron, Dimsdale, and the denizens of Bottleneck see a guy who has lost the phallus game to everyone from the get-go. Destry is a dandy dude, a fancy boy!

Destry is used to mockery and has effective techniques for disarming it — persuasion, self-irony, and sly perceptiveness among them. The stakes are raised when he first meets Kent in the Last Chance. Kent is the Big Man expecting a macho adversary. And though he is tellingly shorter than Destry, and so must feel his way forward, he is delighted when Destry demonstrates that he isn’t packing pistols. Kent doesn’t have to just take Destry’s word for it, Destry lifts his suitcoat to reveal his gunless backside like a can-can dancer, eliciting gales of derisive (and relieved) laughter from Kent and the his Last Chance retinue.

It’s open season for mockery of Destry’s inadequate manhood. Frenchy, always eager to display her phallic power (she has just beaten Boris out of his literal pants in a poker game), compounds the derision by handing Destry her substitutes for manly pistols, a mop and a bucket, replacements for the parasol and birdcage, adding class-mockery on top of gender-mockery. In Bottleneck, a man who won’t fight is nothing better than a scullery maid.

Of course, it’s the women – Lilly Belle and Frenchy — who display the full force of violent never-backing-down in their ensuing brawl, while Destry stands by, still holding mop and bucket. Finally, called to his job as newly appointed keeper of the peace, Destry doses the wildcats with the contents of the bucket, which might as well have been gasoline. So, to add it up thus far, Destry’s first act of peace-keeping is against women, one of whom forces him to flee the scene while she celebrates her victory.

Destry’s next appearance shows the stakes raised even more. Now fully deputized, his neckerchief unbowed and hanging in a more manly vertical, he confronts more mockery about his gunlessness. Creepy (Harry Cording), a wild cowpoke, and his henchmen ride into town, indiscriminately shooting, all in fun. Destry calmly fronts them. One of Creepy’s sidekicks mockingly warns him to be careful of “No Guns Destry,” upon which Destry, himself now in mocking mode, pretends to display the pistols’ potential for “harmless amusement” by shooting knobs off the Last Chance’s sign like a sharpshooter at a carnival shooting gallery. The performance makes its point. If Destry doesn’t use guns, it’s by choice; if he decides to do so, he’s a formidable adversary. It’s essentially Destry’s second act of violence, this one without victims.

Step by step, Destry gains in the phallus game without resorting to guns, but subtly stepping further and further out his pure nonviolent posture. In a pivotal scene, he visits Frenchy, first to flatter her by mock-acknowledging that she’s a phallic queen, “the real boss of Bottleneck,” but really to alert her obliquely that he knows she has been Kent’s accomplice in his property-defrauding poker cheats. He tricks her into admitting that the previous sheriff was murdered. Panicked, she warns him to leave before he’s also in danger. The scene is pivotal, because this is the moment at which the two vectors converge and begin their opposite movements. For the first time, Destry reveals his full power as a Western hero — not through an act of violence against evildoers, but a very subtle, and yet still shocking, small act of violence against a woman. Destry invades Frenchy’s space, without permission smearing her makeup, which is so obviously a source of Frenchy’s — and Dietrich’s! — power, all in the interest of making her “take a good look at [herself].” It’s a moment when Destry’s putative moral purity and strength are manifest combined. Tellingly, he reveals it to a woman that he desires, and yet can allow himself to raise his hand to. Small violence and big desire come together.

The thematic design unfolds inexorably. Destry still refrains from using violence against his main adversaries, but he doesn’t hesitate to sock Tyndall when he implies that Destry’s motives regarding both Frenchy and Kent are dishonorable. The law remains pure, but romance and honor require a show of manly strength. Frenchy, for her part, is stuck between her growing feelings for Destry and her subservience to Kent. No Dietrich film worth its salt would ignore the role of her costumes as signifiers. As long as she enjoys her phallic power derived from Kent’s patronage, she’s attired as a New Orleans courtesan. Her exaggerated femininity is a sign of her power. As she moves closer to Destry’s orbit, she ironically affects less girly duds, until, in her last dance-hall routine, she appears as a rhinestone cowgirl, amusingly sporting a plethora of sequined artificial deputy stars to overmatch Destry’s authentic solitary tin one. She is giving up her femme artifice to become a more ambiguous persona. That will eventually lead to her to “authenticity,” and a sad death by gun violence.

An important, and generally acknowledged, aspect of its genius is the way the film directs its plot design in zigzags, from comic parody to melodrama and back. This movement is contained, though, straightforwardly in a movement from comedy to tragedy. That’s one reason why backfire is such an important narrative motif in Destry. Backfire is a core energy not only in comedy; it’s the core energy in tragedy, too. From one perspective, the finale is appropriate for a comedy. The sun shines on Bottleneck again. The streets are peaceful, boys imitate Destry’s friendly, laid back mannerisms, and marriage is on the horizon. Destry’s momentary warrior self has receded. But coming after the carnage of the shootout and Frenchy’s death, audiences have to decide for themselves whether that’s yet another genre zigzag, or whether that ending just pastes over the more insistent conclusion: the cost of this peace is a femicide and the restoration of “good patriarchy.” As in any good old melodrama, two things that must happen do happen: a central woman must be sacrificed, and a central man must show that he is a Mensch. Destry Rides Again is definitely not a revisionist Western. The inexorable concern of Westerns, “what makes a man a man?”, (not incidentally also the concern, if that’s the right word for it, of romantic comedy), is resolved more or less de rigueur. Although Destry shoots his pistol just once in the entire film (to kill Kent after he’s shot Frenchy), he does do it, even if he’s too late with the shot to save Frenchy’s life. So he’s met the requirements. He has one fleeting fistfight, and a single gunshot. He rarely raises his hands to another person. Except one. In the famous “painted face” scene with Frenchy, he lays his hands on her face, a surprising violation of her boundaries, her autonomy, an almost shocking gesture by the usually gallant Destry. In that gesture, too, he meets the requirements.

So, the tally. The men get their phallic jam back. Destry has proven that even a “pacifist” can wield effective violence when it’s needed. Boris gets his name and his husbandly command back. Dimsdale’s death has been avenged. Kent’s land grabs have been defeated. Law and order prevail. Bottleneck is calm, knowing that their sheriff will protect them and preserve the state’s monopoly on violence. And the distaff warriors can calm down and go back to their proper sphere.

William K. Everson, in his book The Hollywood Western, has reported that Pasternak was explicit that the film had a political subtext: “Friends of producer Joe Pasternak insist that he saw Destry as a very specific anti-Nazi allegory, and that it could be broken down point by point, character to character to prove it.” Everson himself is skeptical. After all, the film began production in the summer of 1939. Germany had not yet invaded Poland, which would only come to pass in mid-September. Before Pearl Harbor, Hollywood notoriously produced very few, if any, films that even obliquely referenced the oncoming War. The national mood was still isolationist, and the studios were reluctant to irritate their lucrative European markets. But Pasternak and Jackson, Jews who had recently fled from Central Europe one step ahead of the Nazis, were certainly more sensitive to events there. They would plausibly have seen some writing on the wall. A U.S. that is reluctant to use force, even though it had proven its ability to do so in the previous war, like the young Destry eschewing the firepower of his father. A community terrorized by a murderous, land-grabbing gang, like another gang seizing some Lebensraum. The slowly dawning need among the morally pure bystanders that the greater community needs protection by force of arms, after all. Until Pearl Harbor, such an allegory would probably have been missed by all but a small minority of exiled Jews and anti-Nazi activists. But looking back from 1941, it appears plausibly “aspirational,” maybe even prescient.

A great film, period.