Before he made his bones as the best writer of crime fiction in America, Elmore Leonard earned his spurs on the dusty trails of the Western, publishing a great many stories in the pulp magazines and several novels, along with some original screenplays. One of the best known films adapted from his work, "3:10 to Yuma," starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, appeared in 1957, during one of the genre's greatest decades. The movie adds texture and suspense to a surprisingly thin and simple short story, but retains the author's characteristic understated style and his familiar subject of an ordinary man risking his life to honor a pledge.

The new version further enriches its basic material, adding a good deal more in the way of action and character, and providing a couple of back stories for those characters. In the process of complicating its plot and people, it also elaborates considerably on its themes of duty and courage, the uncertainty of moral choice and decent conduct in a world that apparently values neither.

The movie opens with a typical Western situation, a rapacious Arizona landowner attempting to intimidate a homesteader, Dan Evans (Christian Bale), and drive him from his ranch. Evans desperately needs money to maintain his small herd and feed his wife and two young sons. A Civil War veteran, he limps from a wound, a condition that defines and symbolizes his inadequacy and ultimately motivates him to prove his courage to his older son, who believes his father a weakling and a coward unable to defend them against the landowner and his men.

The opportunity to save his ranch and redeem himself appears in the person of Ben Wade (Russell Crowe), a notorious murderer, the leader of a vicious gang of outlaws, captured by the authorities. For $200 Evans signs on to help bring Wade to Contention, where he will take the train to the prison at Yuma, a decision that involves a dangerous journey through Apache territory, with the constant menace of attack from Wade's gang. Although the posse suffers casualties, they survive the trek and hole up at a hotel, where the gang mounts a siege.

The long, perilous ride across rough country, culminating in an overpowering sense of fear and hopelessness when they reach Contention, paradoxically intensifies the relationship between the rancher and the outlaw. Wade's chief lieutenant, Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), offers the townspeople money to help him liberate his boss, which the locals, delighted to choose loot over the law, happily accept. When the town marshal and his men surrender to Prince, he shoots them in cold blood, leaving Evans to carry out his job all by himself.

Trapped by corruption and circumstance in the hotel room, Wade and Evans increasingly reveal themselves to each other. Although he tells Evans' son that he is indeed "all bad," Wade displays dimensions of humanity - he likes to sketch his surroundings, charms virtually all the people he speaks with, and though he carries a pistol decorated with a crucifix, known as the Right Hand of God, quotes the Bible constantly. He tries to bribe Evans to give up the mission but comes to admire the steadfastness of his captor, who must face terrible odds to get his prisoner on that 3:10 to Yuma.

Although the film employs many of the comfortingly familiar devices and conventions of its form- outlaws and lawmen, cowboys and Indians, vast empty landscapes traversed by lonely horsemen, shootouts in the streets of dry and desolate towns - it really depends on the relationship between the two central figures. As the clock ticks relentlessly, Evans and Wade, the killer and the rancher, the bad man and the good, the only men of courage among cowards, arrive at some understanding, respect, and sympathy, even a curious friendship, before they join together to face their fate at 3:10 in Yuma. For Wade that destiny hints at freedom, for Evans, it resolves itself into the familiar manhood ritual of the Western, in which the protagonist triumphs over fear and weakness through violence, suffering, a sense of honor, and the simple demands of duty.

3:10 to Yuma

(R), DIRECTED BY JAMES MANGOLD

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