“The Hanging Tree” (1959) recently became the last of Gary Cooper’s major films to arrive on DVD via the Warner Archive Collection manufacture-on-demand program. In one of his best roles, Cooper plays a doctor with a very dark past who arrives at a mining settlement where he becomes involved with a widowed Norwegian immigrant (Maria Schell) he nurses back from near death. This distinctive western, filmed on location in Yakima, Washington, also stars Karl Malden as a gold prospector as well as George C. Scott (in his film debut) as a faith healer who Cooper’s character has crossed paths with before. I recently spoke with Gary Cooper’s daughter, artist and author Maria Cooper Janis (pictured above on her 21st birthday) about the film and her father.
This is only one of two films your father served as a producer.
[After the first, 1944’s “Along Came Jones”] he decided he didn’t like being producer. It gave him ulcers from the stress. But in the late 1950s, he joined newly-formed Baroda Productions because there were 5 or 6 projects he really wanted to do. ‘The Hanging Tree’ was one of his favorite pictures. The story meant a lot to him. He was a Montana boy and had a real resonance with the characters and the drama of the era when there was a push to stake claims. He was born in 1901 in Helena when it was a funny mixture of a rough and ready town at the same time Montana had more millionaires than any other state in the union. Helena even had a hanging tree, so that that was not a foreign dramatic touch to him.
This was near the end of his career [Cooper died of cancer in May 1961, at age 60]. Was he sick at this point?
No, he was fine except for a chronic bad back. He had a fractured his hip as the result of an automobile accident when he was a teenager and it was never set properly, so it was very painful for him to sit astride a horse in the normal way. So he had a special saddle that would allow him to ride a little bit off to the side.
The director of “The Hanging Tree,” Delmer Daves [pictured above with Cooper] was hospitalized during the shoot and Karl Malden directed part of the film. Was your father involved in that decision?
Like my father, Daves was an artist. He drew extensive storyboard squares opposite every page of dialogue indicating blocking and camera angles. My father loved working with Karl Malden and they became buddies and friends. Karl was terrified about taking over, but my father said, just go for it. He had a sense of Karl’s innate good taste and judgement.
Did you visit the set in Washington State while this was shooting?
No, he generally didn’t like family hanging around. He was basically concerned for us because he knew how bloody boring it gets hanging around. My mother and I were there when he was shooting “Garden of Evil” in Mexico and after “Hanging Tree,” we went out to St. George, Utah for “They Came to Cordura,” another atypical Cooper character in a very dark film
“The Hanging Tree” is really one of your father’s most interesting performances, right up there with his Oscar-winning work in “High Noon.”
He was very interested in this particular character because he was able to portray many facets. He was horrible, controlling and brutish yet he had this tremendously kind, mothering sense of caring for people. It’s not your simple black-and-white hero and it’s not your typical western. I have a feeling there must have been more to his relationship to the George C. Scott character that ended up on the cutting room floor.
And it has that wonderful, Oscar-nominated title song by Jerry Livingston and Mack David.
I found clip of Marty Robbins singing it on YouTube. I’m so glad Warner Bros. has finally released this on such a great-looking DVD. I’m so sorry Maria Schell isn’t alive to enjoy this. My father really loved working with her. He always loved acting, and he had a sense of natural timing and clearly was comfortable in his body. He was also as home in white tie and tails as he was in blue jeans, which gave him a very broad base as an actor.
The IMDB lists you as playing “Gary Cooper’s Daughter” on an episode of “The Jack Benny Show” 1958. What was that like?
(Laughs) No, I wasn’t on that show, but I remember it very well! My father sang a rock-and-roll song!
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