an even larger budget to Fuller’s next picture.
The Baron of Arizona reveals both Lippert’s and Fuller’s increased ambitions. Lippert’s announcement of its 1949–1950 slate in Variety signaled its desire to move into more “epic” productions, as it planned three top-budget films, several intermediate and medium-priced pictures, as well as its usual budget westerns. Early trade notices placed The Baron of Arizona in Lippert’s top tier with a projected cost of $300,000, enabling Fuller to mount a historical costume picture with an extended shooting schedule, a ninety-minute running time, and increased production values.18 Fuller’s real coup was in attracting the services of legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe (Air Force [1943], Body and Soul [1947]), who agreed to work for a fraction of his regular fee. Again produced by Hittleman, the film is loosely based on the true story of James Addison Reavis, who planned an elaborate swindle in the 1870s to claim the territory of Arizona using a forged Spanish land grant. The Baron of Arizona introduces motifs and themes that will become characteristic of Fuller’s work, while its visual style features a richness and complexity only intermittently apparent in I Shot Jesse James.
The Baron of Arizona begins in 1912, as a group of tuxedoed dignitaries are toasting the admission of Arizona into the Union. One man, later revealed to be John Griff (Reed Hadley), a forgery expert, offers a toast to Reavis (Vincent Price), who recently celebrated his thirtieth wedding anniversary. Griff then begins to tell Reavis’s tale, prompting a flashback to 1872, when Reavis arrives outside Phoenix at the house of an adolescent girl named Sophia. Reavis tells her guardian, Alvarez (Vladimir Sokoloff), that Sophia’s real name is Peralta, and a Spanish land grant reveals she is the heir to the first baron of Arizona. Reavis summarily joins the makeshift family, molding Sophia into a young baroness and creating the physical evidence of her ancestors’ existence in Arizona. Despite Sophia’s reluctance to part with him, Reavis sails to Spain, where he spends several years disguised first as a monk and then as a gypsy in order to modify all the copies of the actual Spanish land grant. By the time he returns, Sophia has grown into a young woman (Ellen Drew), and the two marry, thereby giving Reavis complete control over her ancestral estate.
The second half of the film concerns Reavis’s attempts to defend Sophia’s claim and develop their land, while the federal government and local landowners contest his control. Griff arrives to lead the government’s investigation and put Reavis on trial, and Reavis, suddenly guilt-stricken, confesses his forgery to Sophia. Sophia stands by Reavis when he gives himself up to Griff, and he explains that his love for his wife is what made him confess. The film comes to a climax as an angry mob attempts to lynch Reavis. With the noose around his neck, Reavis convinces the mob that he must testify in court in order to ensure their land rights, and a newspaper insert announces his sentence of six years in prison. The epilogue portrays Reavis’s release from jail, when he finds Sophia and Alvarez waiting for him in the rain, loyal to the end.
The Baron of Arizona offers more examples of characteristically Fullerian story elements than the writer/director’s first feature, marking it as an early iteration of his emerging narrative tendencies. Here we see for the first time characters named Griff and Gunther; the gratuitous name-dropping of historical and literary figures, such as Pulitzer, Aristotle, and Cain; Fuller’s beloved bust of Beethoven, a signifier of high culture; and a character wielding a cigar. Fuller’s tremendous interest in history and the joy he took in research surfaces in a detailed fashion throughout the film, in scenes concerning the process of document forgery, the significance of the land grants to property holders, and the territory of Arizona. His dialogue writing also becomes more confidently campy, producing such gems as “Your claim is a cheap cigar wrapped in a rich Spanish leaf,” “I feel like Caesar’s wife before he was murdered,” “I don’t want a dead baron, I want a live husband,” and “It is not death but dying that alarms me. It is not your crime but your weakness that alarms me.” And a brief scene of comic relief with a gypsy dwarf presages all the oddball bits Fuller inserts in later narratives that play absolutely no role in advancing the plot.
Despite its prototypical narrative elements, The Baron of Arizona has received scant critical attention over the years and is among Fuller’s lesser-seen pictures. Combining aspects of a costume picture, crime film, thriller, and romance, the movie is admittedly hard to categorize, and the complexity of Reavis’s forgery plot can leave first-time viewers resigned to confusion. Two aspects of the narrative, the frame story and the characterization of Reavis, pose particular difficulties for the film’s reception, as the first gives the plot away and the second challenges plausibility.
Griff’s summary of the story in the opening scene and his subsequent voice-overs describing how Reavis falsified history serve as a frame for the primary plotline, helping to clarify the great leaps across time and space in the first half of the film and to explain why Reavis is running about chiseling on rocks and wooing a Spanish marquessa. Yet Griff’s stiff introduction is both pedestrian and overly revelatory, and his voice-overs disappear following the marriage of Sophia and Reavis. The end result is awkward at best and inadvertently highlights that the exposition is half the film’s running length. At the time of the film’s release, the Motion Picture Herald review noted that the opening scene “mitigated against suspense” and “reportedly will be eliminated,” but no such change was ever made.19 Interestingly, the revised final shooting script contains neither Griff’s initial scene nor his voice-overs; instead, the script begins with Reavis arriving at Alvarez’s house, and Griff first appears halfway through as the government’s investigation gets underway.20 This version appears more typically Fullerian, opening as it does on a scene of confrontation that is rendered in tight close-ups. The revised final shooting script leads one to suspect that the framing scene and voice-overs were added once it became clear to Fuller, Hittleman, or both, that viewer comprehension of the narrative necessitated additional connective tissue to weave together the intricate plot.
The conclusion of the released film creates additional problems for some critics, who complained that Reavis’s recognition of his love for Sophia and subsequent disavowal of the barony appear undermotivated.21 The redemptive power of love is a theme that appears in various forms in a number of Fuller pictures, but rather than figuring as a substantive plotline, here it seems merely tacked-on. Although Griff’s introduction of the story in the opening scene informs us that Reavis has been married for thirty years, as soon as Reavis arrives onscreen the film presents him as nothing less than a cad, an unrepentant liar and manipulator of all those around him. Price’s spirited performance as Reavis, full of raised eyebrows and knowing glances, radiates his character’s delight in criminal activity. His smoldering declaration, “I’ve known many women before, but with you, I’m afraid” becomes a motif, a sign of Reavis’s false nature, as he repeats it first to the gypsy girl Rita, then to the Spanish marquessa, and finally to Sophia. For three-quarters of the film, Reavis’s every onscreen move is motivated by greed; once he appears close to being beaten by Griff, he converts to a repentant husband in only two scenes. But it is hard for viewers to forgive a man they have grown to mistrust; they remember what they have seen (Reavis as a criminal, lying all the way), rather than what they initially heard (Reavis has been married for thirty years). The narrative’s detailed focus on how Reavis attempts to steal Arizona leads viewers to wonder how he almost gets away with it rather than how he is eventually redeemed. Fuller revisits the theme of the power of love to save a criminal to greater effect in Pickup on South Street, with a redemptive woman that is not quite so pure and a criminal who is not so thoroughly redeemed.
It is in the style of The Baron of Arizona that Fuller makes his greatest advances, as he teams with James Wong Howe to produce the most classically staged and visually striking film of his Lippert career. Most likely through the influence of Howe, who was trained within the studio system to cover scenes with many shots at varied angles, Fuller moves beyond the reliance on master shots plus inserts seen in I Shot Jesse James and organizes scenes in a more complex manner. The vast majority of sequences include full coverage and analytical editing, as shots establish characters within space, highlight actions and emotions, and reestablish
