Allan Dwan’s happenstance journey into Hollywood is marked by a myriad of right time-right place encounters that allowed the young engineer to become one of the first great directors in Tinseltown. He initially started script-writing as a way to make some extra cash, but was soon thrust into the director’s chair when a lost company found themselves in need of someone to take up the position. Over the course of his 50-year career, Dwan would direct well over 150 pictures. The largest portion of his career would be in the silent cinema, his blockbuster 1922 Robin Hood marking his grandest achievement of the era. Once the talkie was introduced, Dwan was most often at the helm of a long string of B-pictures. Though he had studied under Griffith just the same as Raoul Walsh, John Ford, and Erich von Stroheim, Dwan’s reputation as a pioneer of Hollywood has never seemed to solidify in the same way. He certainly made far fewer star vehicles after the advent of sound — and the ones he did direct ranged in quality — but Dwan did come to be known to the studios as a fast, reliable presence on set, and his most exciting period of filmmaking came from these virtues.
Specifically, Dwan would direct five films for producer Benedict Bogeaus and RKO pictures from 1954–1956 (and an additional three during that same run that were not tied to RKO). Bogeaus ran tight productions, with budgets running under a million dollars and shoots often lasting just two weeks. It’s in these conditions that a man like Dwan thrived, especially when working with such seasoned pros as cinematographer John Alton, editor James Leicester, art director Van Nest Polglase, and composers Louis Forbes and Howard Jackson, the complete team only ever working on three projects: Silver Lode, Slightly Scarlet, and Tennessee’s Partner (these making up three quarters of his “four parts of a triangle” sequence, along with The River’s Edge).
Tennessee’s Partner, an adaptation of the 1869 short story by Bret Harte, departs from the original text — a low-key Western court drama — but embraces the central duo at its heart, Tennessee (John Payne) and Tennessee’s Partner, Cowpoke (Ronald Reagan). Tennessee is a gambler at the “marriage market” run by Duchess (Rhonda Fleming) and her part-time fling. Duchess lets Tennessee take the other cardholders for all they’re worth, so long as she can take 10% of his winnings and steal the occasional kiss. Cowpoke is introduced to Tennessee when he kills a man who was about to let off a shot into Tennessee’s back after Tennessee had taken him in a card game the previous night. The two form a quick bond in jail, detailing their mutual alienation from society, reflected in their respective stark outlines — as archetypes rather than specific people. Even based on their names alone, they are only vague allusions to the circumstances that make up them — Harte writes as much in the opening to the original short story: “I do not think that we ever knew his real name. Our ignorance of it certainly never gave us any social inconvenience, for at Sandy Bar in 1854 most men were christened anew… Tennessee’s Partner, whom we never knew by any other than this relative title; that he had ever existed as a separate and distinct individuality we only learned later.”
Dwan was an archetypal filmmaker. He painted in the broadest strokes that even the modest B-movie actor could bring belief to. Reagan isn’t a particularly compelling on-screen persona, especially in retrospect given all the political context saddled to his image, but with Dwan’s direction he finds a current that allows his movements the most grace possible. His lack of traditional charisma reads as something else entirely, the sort of charming, naive trust that reveals itself as his heart on his sleeve. Of course, in the wild west such a thing becomes a target, and Tennessee must sort out his partner’s friends from enemies himself on occasion, much to the latter’s dismay. Theirs is a reciprocal relationship, however, based on the common bond of loneliness, and though the west threatens to tear them apart, in the end it’s only a bullet that can separate them — and compel the other to fill the hole with a newfound openness to love. Payne has as much romantic chemistry with Reagan as he does Fleming, which tinges the entire film with the sadness of knowing that he must, by the end, choose between them — his cowboy aloofness and his tender desire. Such sappy material may have caught another director off their game, but Dwan’s sense for melodrama here feels truly unrivaled.
As the final shoot-out among the rocks begins, it’s clear how fated the battleground appears. Though the monuments are smaller than their counterparts in other westerns, these ready-made graves mark a proving ground for the camaraderie that has defined Tennessee’s and Cowpoke’s relationship — a return to the moment of their first encounter: “You know better than to turn your back on a guy like him.” In the film’s final moments, Dwan movingly reaffirms how little they ever did know about each other, one standing over the other’s dead body: “I never even knew his name.”
