The King and Four Queens

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mark g @Mark_Alan_G. 03/05/2025 Gable gives it a decent effort. The scenic beauty and nice sets are impressive. But there isn't anything else positive to say. The story is weak and the supporting actresses weak. Forgettable film made by a talented director. See more Steve D @RT35616104 07/03/2023 The script isn't great but the story is fun. See more 12/18/2014 Ho-hum western with an obvious ending. See more 07/02/2013 A bit melo-dramatic for a western. Clark Gable romancing the ladies primarily. See more 06/24/2013 Light-hearted mix of the Western, mystery, comedy and romance. See more 05/25/2012 Cash Is the Ultimate Family Tie An interested aspect of the Code is that it was more okay for a male to be a rogue and a rascal than a woman. At least, a lovable rogue and rascal, the kind you want to get away with a certain amount of unseemly behaviour. You can have female villains; the [i]femme fatale[/i] rose to her greatest heights under the Code. However, the [i]femme fatale[/i] must somehow be punished, be it by death or by the force of Law. She can't merely wink at the camera and escape penalty the way male characters could. Yes, the Code strictly held that Crime Must Not Pay. But there are a lot of things which aren't exactly crimes but also aren't quite inside the traditions of society, and the double standard only grew stronger under the Code. Whether it was an intended effect or not, I cannot say. All things considered, I wouldn't be surprised. Either way, the violation of that double standard was the only surprising thing about this movie. Dan Kehoe (Clark Gable) just happens to be passing through some obscure little town or another when he finds out that a family of four bank-robbing brothers used to live on a ranch outside town. Their mother, Ma McDade (Jo Van Fleet), still lives there. Three of the four brothers were burned beyond recognition in a standoff with the Law after a bank robbery, and the fourth has disappeared without a trace. All four were married, and all four wives live with Ma McDade, waiting to see which of the brothers will come home. The money from the last robbery has never been found. None of the four know which one is not a widow, and they all wait for whoever's husband it is to come home--and claim his share of the money. Kehoe goes out to the ranch in the hopes of solving the case--and running off with the money--but Ma shoots him. Kehoe manages to convince her not to kill him, but she knows exactly why he's sticking around. And all four women would love to run off with him. In fact, all four women are ready to run off with him before they've even had a conversation with him. I won't reveal which one turns out to be the rogue, but even the good church-going one is perfectly willing to run off with the stranger even though she isn't quite sure if she's a widow or not. The four women gather eagerly around the breakfast table despite the fact that none of them have interacted with him while he was conscious. Oh, I imagine at least part of it is wanting to get away from Ma and the Middle of Nowhere. Living on that ranch couldn't be much fun, and it's quite clear that, without their husbands' shares of the loot, the women didn't have any kind of stake. Leaving wouldn't be easy; leaving might not even be possible. Still, it's not a great picture of women if you stop to think about it. It ought to be obvious that Kehoe was more interested in the money than in any specific woman, but none of them much seemed to care. Oh, and Clark Gable was fifty-five. Jo Van Fleet was forty-two. The other four women were floating on one side or another of thirty. Okay, yes, Jo Van Fleet looked older than she was, but it wouldn't surprise me to know that it was makeup. Any way you look at it, this is an ongoing issue that doesn't owe much to the Code. Women just aren't allowed to age in Hollywood and never have been. A man is allowed to be shown in a romance with a woman literally decades his younger; Sean Connery and Woody Allen have both had onscreen romances with women young enough to be their granddaughters. (Okay, and offscreen, in Allen's case.) But unless all four of the McDade wives were with men ten years their junior, they literally were not young enough to be Ma's daughters-in-law. And heaven forbid a woman in a film be in a relationship with a man young enough to be her grandson without it being the point of the film. Though I admit that most people I know find Woody Allen creepy when he does that kind of thing, and he seems to have stopped casting himself as a romantic lead at least. Yeah, okay, there's more to the story, and by focusing on feminist issues, I'm missing some discussion. On the other hand, I'm not missing much. Because there simply isn't that much here to discuss. Con man goes after money, kind of gets conned. There just isn't that much more to the story except the bits you probably aren't supposed to be considering. I freely admit that Clark Gable was still a handsome enough man, if not the sort of person where teenage girls would be singing "You Made Me Love You (I Didn't Want to Do It)." Judy Garland did that on film, and it was believable--but it was also 1937. What might make a more interesting version of the story would be if he were romancing [i]Ma[/i] and the wives were trying to prevent her from giving the money which they thought was rightly theirs to the stranger. Of course, it's also worth noting that no one seems much concerned that the money isn't rightly theirs. How dare the sheriff (Roy Roberts) try to get it back? 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The King and Four Queens

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