Tribute to a Bad Man (1956)
Actors:
Onslow Stevens (actor),
Bud Osborne (actor),
Royal Dano (actor),
Buddy Roosevelt (actor),
Vic Morrow (actor),
Roy Engel (actor),
James Griffith (actor),
John Halloran (actor),
Charles Anthony Hughes (actor),
James Cagney (actor),
Tom London (actor),
James Bell (actor),
Stephen McNally (actor),
Dennis Moore (actor),
Lee Van Cleef (actor),
Plot: Jeremy Rodock is a tough horse rancher who strings up rustlers soon as look at them. Fresh out of Pennsylvania, Steve Miller finds it hard to get used to Rodock's ways, although he takes an immediate shine to his Greek girl Jocasta.
Keywords: 1800s, animal-abuse, animal-cruelty, arm-wound, based-on-short-story, bedbug, bloody-feet, bunkhouse, chinese-american, cowboy
Genres:
Drama,
Romance,
Western,
Taglines: TOUGH AS A DESERT CACTUS! (original print ad - all caps) Cagney in his greatest role! As it really was! A big, blazing drama of the West!
Quotes:
Jeremy Rodock: You know, I ain't got you figured yet, McNulty. You act like a man with a lot of ideas. But all of them second rate... and not one honorable.::McNulty: Kee - rect.
Jeremy Rodock: One thing you gotta learn tho - horse is man's slave but treat 'em like a slave and you ain't a man.
Fat Jones: [In the bunkhouse: Steve is moving in] Say, friend... You don't just happen to have one of them new mail order catalogues?::Steve Miller: No, I ain't.::Fat Jones: Feller told me they had pictures in them this year - women in corsets.::Wrangler in bunkhouse: Fats, you got a dirty mind. That's why you'll never amount to nothin'.::Fat Jones: I ain't seen a woman - outside 'o Jocasta - in eight months. And you ain't gettin' no prettier. [Other wrangler gives him the finger]
Jeremy Rodock: [Explaining to Jocasta why he must go search out and hang the horse thieves, in spite of Jo's wishes to the contrary] Jo... you come as close to bein'... well, as close to bein' everything to me as anything livin'. But I still can't do what you want me to do. We're livin' in the middle of nowhere. Two hundred miles from any kind of law and order. Except for what I built myself. Ever since I started - and this you don't know - I've been badgered, skunked, bitten out and bushwhacked by thieves from everywhere. And now, one of my men's been killed. I find my horses, I find the killer. If I find the killer, I hang him. I gotta' keep my own reckoning, Jo. It's the way I built my life and half the transportation of the West. Goodbye, Jo.
Jocasta Constantine: [Offering to loan Steve ten dollars] I'd lend you more, if you would use the money to go back home.::Steve Miller: Go home? Why?::Jocasta Constantine: Steve, we've only talked a few times since you came here. But I know this about you. You are gentle. You haven't been used, and made hard. This is not your kind of life. Look at the men in the bunkhouse: Baldy, and Fat Jones, and Abe. Never a chance for a family, or a home. In ten years, you're gonna' be like them - a "nobody" on a horse. That's what a wrangler is: a "nobody" on a horse. With bad teeth, broken bones, double hernia, and lice!
Jocasta Constantine: Go home. Before you kill your first man. Or put a rope on your first hanging, and it begins to eat you up alive. Learn a decent trade. Find yourself a nice girl and get married. Live in a place where you can bring up children. A normal life. A normal life that... Steve, I... I'm sorry. Sometimes I think you're my own man. The old dreams.
Steve Miller: [Upset at Mr. Rodock after witnessing Rodock's hanging of a horse thief - an impromptu "frontier justice" hanging, done without benefit of a formal trial] Maybe I ain't hard, maybe that's why. But Mr. Rodock, you didn't have to hang him.
Jeremy Rodock: [Explaining to Jocasta why he felt the hanging was necessary] I tell ya' Jo, it's the only way. It's FEAR that keeps men honest. And with that hangin' today, I laid fear like a fence ten feet high, around my property!
Jocasta Constantine: [to Mr. Rodock] I understand now why you never married or ever wanted to marry. To marry you have to invest your heart in someone. How can you invest if you don't trust?
Jeremy Rodock: [Jeremy to Jocasta as Steve rides away on Jeremy's horse] A fella doesn't die of a broken heart from his first love, only from his last.