The Baron of Arizona (1950)

Director: Samuel Fuller
Writer: Samuel Fuller
Stars: Vincent Price and Ellen Drew

Index: The First Thirty.

It took sixteen films for Vincent Price to get top billing, with Shock, and it took eleven more for him to get it again, with a low budget gem from cult director Sam Fuller. Like Bagdad, I’ve seen this one before. Unlike Bagdad, I’m happy to watch it again.

“To the state of Arizona!” is the toast as this film begins and that’s because it’s Valentine’s Day 1912 and we’re finally part of the union as the 48th and last continental state. John Griff is giving this toast and he follows up with “to a real lover of Arizona, my friend James Addison Reavis.” And everybody present is shocked.

They’re shocked because, while Reavis is the lead character here, he’s not the hero; he’s the villain. And we promptly go into flashback to a rainy night outside Phoenix forty years earlier to find out why.

Reavis is visiting Sofia, a peasant girl being brought up by Pepito Alvarez, because he says that she’s the only living descendant of Miguel de Peralta, the first Baron of Arizona, and he’s got the papers to prove it. He takes her in and, with the aid of a governess, he moulds her into the lady her heritage warrants. Later, he plans to marry her so they can claim the territory of Arizona for their own.

Of course, none of it is real. He’s a swindler, basing his claim on the fact that the terms of the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo at the end of the Mexican-American War didn’t merely cede most of northern Mexico, including all or part of what is now seven states, to the U.S., it put a requirement on the latter to honour any land grants that had been made by the Spanish or Mexican governments in the past.

And so Reavis conjures up a fictional land grant for what amounts to most of the Arizona territory, using such extreme patience that it would beggar belief if it wasn’t based on a true story. And, while there has sadly never been a feature length documentary on Reavis, he was indeed a real swindler and much of what we might struggle to believe in this fictional story are things that he actually did.

Now, this is fiction. The real James Addison Reavis didn’t do everything that his fictional equivalent does in this feature and he didn’t do some of it to the same degree, but he did do much of it and in much the same way.

He collated a couple of large trunks full of documents, both American and Mexican, even if he forged a good deal of it, and he claimed a substantial chunk of the territory of Arizona, including all of Phoenix, Casa Grande, Globe and even into New Mexico. When this claim fell through, he found an heiress, married her and put her through a convent school while he collated a wealth of new documents, some in Spain, even if he forged a good deal of it.

I don’t know how charismatic Reavis was in real life but Price brings his expected elegance and charm to the role and clearly relishes the opportunity to play not only a lead character but one who dominates the film. Much of The Baron of Arizona follows him as he goes to great lengths to make his fraud credible, so far as to spend three years as a monk in Spain in order to gain access to the original copies of the land grants he needs to alter in his favour.

In fact, he’s so dominant that it’s hard to be sure who to rank after him. Ellen Drew has the second billing as the leading lady, but she isn’t in the picture for the longest time because her character is played by Karen Kester until the point that Reavis is done with his prep work and she’s old enough to marry him. Even then, Sofia isn’t the focus, more the means.

Vladimir Sokoloff gets some good scenes as Pepito, Sofia’s guardian, but, however long he continues to hover, he’s always in periphery. Reed Hadley is excellent as John Griff, Reavis’s nemesis as a government expert on the art of forgery, but, prologue aside, he isn’t needed in the film until Reavis has filed his claim and it’s time to examine it. Everybody else comes and goes, as Reavis goes about his swindle.

So this is Price’s show and he does a lot with it, from credible humility as he infiltrates the Spanish monastery to outrageous grandeur as he tells every miner, farmer and businessman in Arizona, not to forget the U.S. government, that they happen to be squatting on his land and should pay him for the privilege.

I like The Baron of Arizona a lot, even if we’re in no doubt from the outset that Reavis fails at his ambitious scheme. After all, I happen to be in Arizona right now, writing this in my own house in Phoenix and no Reavis descendant is knocking on my door asking for rent. Even if you’re reading this in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, the prologue made it pretty clear.

Sam Fuller is very aware that he can’t build suspense on that front, so he does his utmost to make us wonder how far Reavis gets. That’s the key here. This isn’t really about some dude who dreamt up a grandiose scheme to get rich by stealing what amounts to an entire state of the union. It’s about the fact that he nearly got away with it.

And, sure, Sam Fuller made some stuff up in an attempt to make this story more cinematic. What’s hilarious is that, even though he didn’t market this as a biopic, it’s more accurate than many and very probably most actual biopics to come out of Hollywood.

After all, remember what George M. Cohan said after seeing Yankee Doodle Dandy, a biopic about George M. Cohan which landed James Cagney an Oscar for playing George M. Cohan: “Great film! Who’s it about?” Not everything here would stand up in court but Reavis would absolutely recognise himself and what he did.

It doesn’t hurt that the cinematography was by a master of the art, James Wong Howe, who had five Oscar nominations behind him but no wins quite yet; he’d eventually win twice.

Frankly, the biggest problem with the film is the fact that Vincent Price, with two excellent showings as the top billed actor, didn’t get to carry on in that vein quite yet. I only have three more of his First Thirty films to go and he’s sadly not the lead in any of them. Well, that or the fact that he never acted for Sam Fuller again.

This was a very early Fuller, his second film in the director’s chair after I Shot Jesse James in 1949. However, he quickly became one of the very best American directors, his first absolute masterpiece, Park Row, arriving only two years later. I’d love to have seen Price in something else from Fuller, especially around this period before Price found his way into a single genre and struggled to fully find his way out again.