Showdown is a 1973 western starring two of my favorite actors, Dean Martin and Rock Hudson. Somehow I missed Showdown during my teenage years, when I first became obsessed with Old Hollywood movies. I watched Showdown for the first time the other night, and I was pleasantly surprised by how good a movie it is.
Showdown was the final movie directed by George Seaton, one of those Golden Age directors whose calling card was his versatility. Seaton’s best known movies today are probably the original Miracle on 34th Street, starring a very young Natalie Wood, The Country Girl, which Grace Kelly won her Oscar for, and also starred Bing Crosby and William Holden, and Airport, with Dean Martin and Burt Lancaster leading an all-star cast in the film that started the disaster movie trend of the 1970’s. Three very different movies, but all are excellent.
Martin and Hudson play friends who grew up together but now find themselves on different sides of the law. Hudson has recently become sheriff, and he has to track down Martin, who was involved in a train robbery. The movie frequently uses flashbacks to explain the backstory of the characters, an effective technique.
The two leading actors are perfectly cast. Dean Martin brings a charming roguishness to his character, Billy Massey. Dino almost always played the good guy in his films, and it’s really interesting to see him play a character who is more morally ambiguous. He’s very good at doing so. Dean had so much charm, he would have made a very interesting bad guy. Rough Night in Jericho is the only movie I know of where Martin really plays a villain. Rock Hudson brings his good-guy charm to the sheriff, and he’s perfect as the upstanding Chuck Jarvis. Both Hudson and Martin were so charming and charismatic, it’s impossible to not like them.
The female lead is Susan Clark, probably best known for playing the mom on the 1980’s sitcom Webster. I didn’t realize until now that Clark was married to Alex Karras, the former NFL star who played her husband on Webster. And of course, every comedy fan knows Karras as Mongo in Blazing Saddles. Clark does an excellent job of playing Kate, who meets Billy and Chuck when they are trying to run a ranch together. Eventually, Kate marries Chuck, and Billy, who has always had feelings for Kate too, moves away, as it’s too painful for him to be in such close proximity to Kate. Female roles in westerns are almost always thankless parts to play, but Clark has great chemistry with Hudson, and their scenes together sparkle.
Showdown is really a buddy movie, no doubt influenced by the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid a few years before. Martin and Hudson have strong chemistry together, and their scenes are full of easy camaraderie. Showdown was different from how I had expected the movie to be, and I was glad that it didn’t hit all of the story beats that I thought it would. Quentin Tarantino wrote “It’s the film’s low-key modesty that ends up being one of its most charming features.” I completely agree.
Behind the scenes, Showdown had a difficult shoot. Dean Martin had filed for divorce from his wife Jeanne shortly before filming began. Martin’s divorce would prove to be very expensive, as the final settlement was a whopping $6.5 million. (Dino, by Nick Tosches, p.422) Martin was already in a relationship with Kathy Hawn, who would become his third wife. From everything I’ve read about Kathy Hawn, she sounds like a real piece of work, as they say. Dean and Kathy’s marriage lasted just three years before they got divorced. Interestingly enough, none of Dean’s 3 wives ever remarried after their divorces from Dean. But then who could compare with Dean Martin?
So, Dean Martin was probably not his usual happy, convivial self when he began filming Showdown. Nick Tosches interviewed Susan Clark about Showdown for his 1992 biography Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams. Clark said of Dean, “He kept very much to himself...He was very gracious and polite, but rather vague. He was always charming to me. He was, you know, the Italian gentleman. But he didn’t seem real happy to be there...He wasn’t awfully fond of Rock. It was disappointing that the two men didn’t really hit it off.” (Dino, p.418)
Martin and Hudson had both been Hollywood A-listers for twenty years by the time they worked together on Showdown, so I assume they met each other socially at various events. Their easy camaraderie in Showdown sure makes it seem as though they were friends. But of course, they were both really nice guys, so they were probably friendly to each other without really becoming friends.
Susan Clark recalled that Dean threw a wrap party when filming concluded. He asked her to dance with him, and he sang “That’s Amore” to her as they danced. What a wonderful memory. (Dino, p.422)
Dean Martin loved horses. His daughter Deanna wrote “He claimed he’d read Black Beauty in school, and it made him cry, so he decided never to read another book again.” (Memories are Made of This, p.151) As a writer and a reader, I’m both horrified and amused by Dean’s pragmatic decision. But I suspect that Dean’s love and empathy for animals may have been partially behind his decision to forsake fiction. Dean loved horses, so he didn’t like reading about Black Beauty being mistreated. Dean rode the same horse in many of his westerns. The horse was named Tops, and you can see Tops in Showdown. He even calls the horse “Tops” in his dialogue. When Tops died in the middle of filming, around the small town of Chama, in northern New Mexico, Dean left the set to take Tops back to California to bury him. Universal shut down production and sued Dean for $6,000,000. (Dino, p.419) Dean eventually returned to the set to finish the movie.
Nick Tosches felt that Martin leaving the set of Showdown was so significant that he used it as a short prologue to open his 1992 biography Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams. Tosches saw the event as a kind of breakdown, or mid-life crisis for Martin. Throughout the book, Tosches entered into Dino’s mind and wrote from Martin’s point of view. Here’s an example: “stuck there, in the middle of nowhere, fifty-something years old, playing cowboy with fucking Rock Hudson...wondering why, after more than twenty-one years of marriage, he was throwing away his wife for a twenty-four-year-old piece of ass whose lies he didn’t even believe; wondering what the fuck he was doing there, for a lousy twenty-five grand a week when he had more millions than he could ever live to spend; wondering what the fuck he had been doing all these years.” (p.2)
Tosches doesn’t mention the death of Tops in this prologue, even though that seems to have been the event that was the catalyst for Martin leaving the set. (Tosches does mention the death of Tops when he covers the filming of Showdown later in the book, on page 419.) Personally, I doubt that all of those thoughts were going through Dean Martin’s mind that day, although it makes for a good story. I think it was simpler than Tosches makes it out to be. I think Dean Martin was really sad about the death of his beloved horse, and he wanted to honor Tops by doing one last favor for him and burying him in California. So, he left the set of the movie. Dean didn’t care what anyone said; he was going to do right by Tops. If you want to see Dean Martin’s love for horses, there’s a wonderful clip of him and his Andalusian horses from his 1977 TV special.
After Dean returned, there was another long delay in filming Showdown, as Rock Hudson crashed a car into a wall on the set. He broke several ribs and was in the hospital for eight weeks. Tosches writes that Hudson crashed a “steam car,” and however this related to the plot must have been rewritten, as Hudson doesn’t drive a car of any kind, steam or gasoline powered, in the finished movie.
The production lasted so long that you can watch Dean Martin’s hair change from scene to scene. For a while in the early 1970’s, Martin had blonde highlights, and you can see that look in parts of Showdown. It’s odd to see Martin, with his Italian heritage, with anything other than his signature dark black hair. I blame Kathy Hawn, who worked as a receptionist at a beauty salon, for Dean’s blonde highlights. You can also see Dean’s natural dark hair in other scenes in the movie. Side note: I wonder if Dino ever dyed his hair? I feel like he must have towards the end of his life, but I know there are Italian people who never go gray.
An odd fact about Showdown is that the top billing varies from format to format: in the credits as you watch the movie, Rock Hudson has top billing. But on some of the contemporary promotional material like posters, Dean Martin gets top billing. This split billing has continued into the present day: Dean had top billing on the VHS release, and Rock gets top billing on the current Blu-Ray, released by Kino Lorber.
If you’re a fan of Dean Martin or Rock Hudson, you’ll probably enjoy watching Showdown; it’s a very entertaining movie.
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