Well-Adjusted Gay Couple, Arizona Territory 1883.
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
The “marriage” of Hume Cronyn’s Mr. Whiner and John Randolph’s Mr. McNutt in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s There Was a Crooked Man… is, astonishingly, Hollywood’s first depiction of a happy and well‑adjusted gay couple. Yes, they bicker, squabble, and needle each other. But it’s obvious they’re madly in love. And no, Cronyn and Randolph are not in WeHo or the Hamptons—they’re in a ramshackle excuse for a prison, or as Scarlett O’Hara might put it, a horse jail. The setting is the Arizona Territory, circa 1883. The main plot concerns a $500,000 stash hidden by Kirk Douglas, who lands in the same jail and becomes the target of Henry Fonda’s upright Sheriff Woodward W. Lopeman.
This was Mankiewicz’s only Western, and it’s a marvelous ride—wry, literate, and slyly subversive. The script by David Newman and Robert Benton, fresh off their triumph with Bonnie and Clyde, is a pleasure in itself. Every line feels savored.
In many ways, the film plays like an alternate‑universe All About Eve, with Cronyn and Randolph stepping into the Bette Davis–Thelma Ritter dynamic: the sharp tongue, the deep affection, the unspoken history. Two of Hollywood’s greatest character actors, they approach their roles with a mixture of knowingness and respect, and they’re brilliantly funny without ever tipping into caricature. Their scenes together have a warmth and ease that feel decades ahead of their time.
Cheers to them both.
