Destry Rides Again. 1939. USA. Directed by George Marshall. Screenplay by Felix Jackson, Gertrude Purcell, Henry Myers, based on the novel by Max Brand. With James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, Brian Donlevy, Charles Winninger, Mischa Auer. DCP. Restored by Universal Pictures and The Film Foundation. 94 min.
Declared “box office poison” in a 1938 trade ad by American exhibitors, Marlene Dietrich was hired by Universal producer Joe Pasternak at half her former salary to play Frenchy, a saloon entertainer in the corrupt town of Bottleneck. Dietrich threw herself at the part with a coarseness and a comic energy that left her reputation permanently altered: less ethereal, more erotic, and working hard for every laugh. She sings “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have” in a voice roughened to match the room, and her brawl with Una Merkel over a pair of stolen trousers—raw enough to draw censorship attention—remains among the more disreputable sequences in 1930s Hollywood.
It was James Stewart’s first Western—a genre only recently reclaimed for adults by Stagecoach. His Deputy Tom Destry—soft-spoken, milk-drinking, refusing on principle to carry a gun—plays the idealism for laughs before letting it harden into something more considered. The year was 1939, and the pacifist subtext was not lost on audiences watching Europe mobilize; George Marshall constructs the final act around the tension between Destry’s principled restraint and the violence it can only defer, not prevent.