Directed by: James Edward Grant

Starring: John Wayne, Gail Russell, Harry Carey, Bruce Cabot, Irene Rich

STORY

John Wayne is Quirt Evans, and Quirt is no fresh-faced cowboy looking for adventure. He's a notorious gunfighter—a hard, dangerous man who has survived the West by living according to its most unforgiving rules.
Then Quirt rides, wounded and exhausted, onto the farm of Thomas Worth and his Quaker family. He collapses, and instead of turning the gunman away, the Worths take him in. Their daughter Penelope “Penny” Worth (Gail Russell)helps nurse him back to health. Penny is gentle but hardly weak, and she sees something in Quirt that the gunfighter himself has spent years ignoring.
Quirt soon finds himself confronted by something more difficult than another gunfight: a completely different way of living. The Worths believe in compassion, forgiveness and nonviolence. Quirt believes in surviving long enough to shoot the other fellow first.
And then there's Laredo Stevens (Bruce Cabot), Quirt's old enemy. Quirt hasn't forgotten the score between them, and Laredo certainly hasn't forgotten Quirt.
Standing between the two worlds is Marshal Wistful McClintock (Harry Carey), a wonderfully seasoned lawman who knows exactly what Quirt Evans is—and may understand him better than Quirt realizes.

As Quirt falls in love with Penny, the central question becomes larger than which gunfighter will win.
Can a man who has spent his life answering violence with violence actually choose another life?
That's what separates Angel and the Badman from the earlier Wayne Westerns we've been collecting. There are guns, horses, villains and Western landscapes—but underneath them is a genuine character story about whether love and conscience can change a man who has built his entire identity around the gun.
And suddenly we're seeing something much closer to the mature John Wayne screen presence audiences would come to know.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS

JOHN WAYNE WASN'T JUST THE STAR — HE WAS THE PRODUCER
THIS is the big one.
Angel and the Badman was the first feature produced by John Wayne's production company, Patnel Productions, and Wayne's first producing effort for Republic Pictures.
Think about the journey we're already showing on Absolutely Westerns.
In The Big Trail, Wayne is a 23-year-old actor being given an enormous opportunity.
Then come the economical Lone Star Westerns—The Lucky Texan, West of the Divide, Blue Steel—where he's working constantly and developing the screen persona that will eventually make him an icon.
Now it's 1947.
John Wayne isn't merely standing in front of the camera anymore.
He's helping make the movie.
For a network created by an independent filmmaker for independent filmmakers, THAT is exactly the kind of career evolution we want to point out.
WHY DID REPUBLIC MAKE WAYNE A PRODUCER?
There's a wonderful piece of studio politics behind it.
According to the production history cited by AFI, Republic chief Herbert Yates made Wayne a producer partly to keep other studios from luring him away.
That's quite a change from the young actor grinding through low-budget Westerns.
By 1947, John Wayne had become valuable enough that the studio needed to give him something more.
Ownership.

HARRY CAREY — NOW THIS IS WESTERN HISTORY
And here is one of our favorite reasons for bringing this movie into Absolutely Westerns.

HARRY CAREY.
Carey plays Marshal Wistful McClintock, and his presence alongside Wayne carries enormous historical weight.
Carey was one of the great stars of the silent Western and one of the actors most closely associated with the early career of John Ford.
So when Harry Carey shares the screen with John Wayne, we're watching two generations of Western history overlap.
The old Western tradition and the man who would become one of the genre's defining stars are standing in the same movie.
That's Treasure Chest material.

AND HARRY CAREY'S CONNECTION TO JOHN FORD GETS EVEN BETTER
Harry Carey starred in numerous early Ford Westerns and became one of the filmmaker's formative collaborators.
Wayne, of course, would later become Ford's most famous Western leading man.
So Angel and the Badman creates a wonderful historical bridge:
HARRY CAREY → JOHN FORD → JOHN WAYNE.

That isn't merely casting.
That's Western lineage.

GAIL RUSSELL — PENNY WORTH
The “angel” of the title is Gail Russell's Penelope Worth.
AFI notes that Russell was actually borrowed from Paramount for the production.
And there's an amusing bit of character-name confusion in the historical record. Some reviews and records call her Prudence, but in the actual film she's called Penelope or Penny.
AIN ruling:
We listen to the movie. Her name is Penny.

BRUCE CABOT!
Another terrific recognizable face joins our Westernlandia company.
Bruce Cabot plays Laredo Stevens.
And classic-film audiences may immediately know Cabot from an entirely different sort of adventure:
KING KONG.
Cabot played Jack Driscoll opposite Fay Wray in the 1933 classic.
So Absolutely Westerns gives us another wonderful discovery connection:
King Kong → John Wayne → Westernlandia.
Movies really are one enormous family tree.

ARCHIE STOUT — AGAIN!
At this point Archie Stout might need his own bunkhouse at AIN.
Archie J. Stout photographed Angel and the Badman.
We've already encountered him shooting Wayne in:
The Lucky Texan
West of the Divide
Blue Steel
And now, thirteen years later:
Angel and the Badman.
That means AIN viewers can literally watch the photographic relationship continue from Wayne's inexpensive 1934 programmers into a far more ambitious 1947 production.
And Stout would eventually photograph Wayne again for John Ford on The Quiet Man.
That is a career arc worth watching.

THEY WENT TO MONUMENT VALLEY
Now we're REALLY in John Wayne country.
Location shooting took place around Flagstaff and Sedona, Arizona, and Monument Valley, Utah.

MONUMENT VALLEY.
The landscape that became almost inseparable from the mythology of the American movie Western.
John Ford had already made spectacular use of Monument Valley in Stagecoach and would return repeatedly.
So even though Angel and the Badman isn't directed by Ford, the sight of John Wayne riding through Monument Valley carries instant Western-film DNA.

JAMES EDWARD GRANT DID DOUBLE DUTY
James Edward Grant didn't merely direct the film.
He wrote AND directed it.
Grant became an important Wayne collaborator and wrote or contributed to numerous Wayne projects.
And here's something I particularly like about Angel and the Badman: Grant gives Wayne a story where the hero's greatest conflict isn't merely defeating the villain.
It's deciding what kind of man he wants to be.
That's considerably richer territory than:
Bad guy stole cattle. Find bad guy. Punch bad guy.
Although AIN has absolutely nothing against punching the bad guy when necessary.

IT ALMOST HAD A DIFFERENT TITLE
AFI reports the working title:
ANGEL AND THE OUTLAW.
Modern sources also identify another working title:
THE GUN.
But somebody made the right decision.
Angel and the Badman immediately tells us what the story is about:
Her influence. His reputation. Their conflict.
Much better.

QUAKERS IN A JOHN WAYNE WESTERN
This is one of the things that makes the movie unusual.
The Worth family's commitment to nonviolence isn't merely background decoration. It's the moral challenge at the center of the story.
Quirt Evans has built his life around violence.
Penny's family has built theirs around rejecting it.
Put those two philosophies in the same house and you've got a Western where the most important showdown may be happening inside the hero.

AND THEN THERE'S MARSHAL WISTFUL McCLINTOCK
Can we simply appreciate that name?
WISTFUL McCLINTOCK.
Harry Carey plays him with exactly the sort of lived-in Western authority that makes the character feel as though he existed long before the camera arrived.
And there's something lovely about Carey—the elder statesman of Westerns—being the lawman watching over the younger Wayne.

LOOK DEEPER INTO THE CAST
Western fans should keep their eyes open.
Among the uncredited players are familiar Western character faces including Paul Fix and Hank Worden.
Those are precisely the faces that make classic Western fans say:
“WAIT—I KNOW THAT GUY!”
And that's one of the joys of an AIN collection like this. Watch enough Westerns together and suddenly the supporting players become old friends.

A MUCH BIGGER JOHN WAYNE MOVIE
Compare this with our 1934 Lone Star pictures.
Those films generally run somewhere around an hour.
Angel and the Badman runs approximately 100 minutes.
We're no longer watching Wayne race through a compact B-Western programmer.
The movie has room for romance, character development, moral conflict and atmosphere.
And Wayne now has enough star power to carry it.