It’s very easy for bookworms to get into animated discussions over frankly and frustratingly inaccurate movie adaptations. Today, I’m doing something a little different: I’m going to examine the case of the adaptation that looks accurate on the surface, but in less obvious ways, shifts the theme or message of the story to something quite different than what the author seemed to intend. I’m sure this happens in every genre, but for the purpose of this series, I’m taking a look at two Western movies where this shift really jumped out at me when I’d both read the original stories and watched the adaptations.
Fair warning: I’ll be discussing the plots of the original stories and the movies in detail, so if you want to avoid spoilers, you’d best scuttle off and read or watch them first!
Paso Por Aqui and Four Faces West (1948)
Paso Por Aqui (which is Spanish for “passed by here” or “passed this way,” from a reference to Inscription Rock in the story) is Eugene Rhodes’ best-known work, a novella originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1926. Twenty-two years later it was adapted into a movie titled Four Faces West (the meaning of that title as applied to the story still isn’t exactly clear to me). In both book and film, a man named Ross McEwen robs a bank and flees from the law across the New Mexican desert. In the course of his flight he comes across a Mexican family suffering with diphtheria, and stays to nurse them and save their lives, ultimately meaning that pursuit will catch up with him.
The Two McEwens
In the novella, McEwen is a young man, red-headed, sanguine, on the daring or reckless side; with no apparent motive for robbing the bank except, of course, the usual one of coming away with money. Early in the story, nearly cornered by the initial posse pursuing him, he cuts his losses and dumps the stolen money, giving himself a chance to get away while the posse peels off to collect the fluttering bills. For a while McEwen plays cat-and-mouse with subsequent pursuers, keeping up a running commentary on the game and the landscape to his horse; and then finally, exhausted after a rough desert crossing, arrives at the door of the diphtheria-stricken family.
In Four Faces West we meet McEwen (Joel McCrea), who comes across as a little older and more sedate personality, robbing a bank for money to pay off his father’s mortgage. The money is sent off to fulfill its purpose rather than dumped to divert a posse.
The most flat-out deviation from the original plot is the introduction of a love interest, Miss Hollister (Frances Dee), an Eastern nurse whom McEwen meets while on the lam (a more sedate flight, by train and wagon). Miss Hollister is in fact a character in the original story, but one who has been made over to serve a totally different purpose. In Paso Por Aqui she is a side character, still a nurse (with a separate love interest of her own) whose function is to show New Mexico through Eastern eyes, who hears the story of McEwen’s robbery and initial flight told by a pleasant-mannered Mexican gambler named Monte. In the film Monte (Joseph Calleia) becomes a rather enigmatic, entertaining character who travels alongside McEwen and Miss Hollister for part of their journey, and seems to have a shrewd idea just who McEwen is but covers for him in order to preserve a source of amusement.
When McEwen eventually confesses his identity and guilt to Miss Hollister, she first pleads with him to repay the money and turn himself in, then impulsively joins him in a horseback flight across the desert, in a rather confusing montage that tracks their progress miles across a map, but all seems to take place on the same afternoon. After they are separated, McEwen’s journey mostly parallels the novella again up through his encounter with the stricken family. [Read more…]
“Delicious” is an adjective I often find myself using to describe a really good book, so a tag comparing books to different flavors of cake seems somehow fitting; and it seemed like a nice light bit of amusement for the midst of a summer vacation—so accordingly I picked up the challenge from 
