Mail Order Bride

Buddy Ebsen deserves better than this.

Not that Mail Order Bride is a bad western. It’s workmanlike, occasionally charming, and features Ebsen in a performance that reminds us he could have been a character actor for the ages if Hollywood had let him. He plays Will Lane, a former lawman determined to civilize his dead partner’s no-good son. His solution? Find the kid a wife through the mail order catalog. The same trick that settled down the father might work on the boy.

Director Burt Kennedy knows his way around the genre. He shoots outdoors when he can, and when he ventures inside, the sets feel authentically broken-in. There’s genuine pathos in an early graveyard scene between Ebsen and western legend Paul Fix—minimal dialogue, maximum impact. Kennedy would later go full comedy with Support Your Local Sheriff, but here he keeps things light without tipping into farce. When guns go off, people die.

Ebsen plays the grizzled veteran who’s seen everything twice. He’s always one step ahead of Keir Dullea’s hot-headed hellion, and watching him work is the film’s chief pleasure. Warren Oates shows up as the kid’s silver-tongued buddy, and in an early but meaty role, he’s terrific. Oates has that eely quality—you know he’s poison but you can’t look away.

Which brings us to the film’s central problem: Dullea. He’s serviceable. We dislike him without quite hating him. But he’s too clean-cut, too movie-star handsome to inhabit the same dusty world as Ebsen and Fix. You keep wondering what Oates could have done with the lead role.

Lois Nettleton plays the titular bride with admirable restraint. No hysterics, no mugging. But she never lights up the screen either. We need to understand why Dullea falls for her almost instantly. We need to feel that chemistry. We don’t.

Kennedy papers over some of this with beautiful location work. The film looks great, aside from a few egregious day-for-night shots that fool no one.

In the end, I can’t quite recommend Mail Order Bride. But you could do far worse than spending 83 minutes watching Buddy Ebsen be a grizzled badass opposite Warren Oates’ serpent. Ditch the romantic subplot entirely. Just let Ebsen whip Dullea and Oates up and down that terrific scenery for 80 straight minutes.

Now that might be a great movie.