General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Jubal

Jubal is a 1956 American Western directed by Delmer Daves, starring Glenn Ford as an itinerant cowhand whose arrival at a Wyoming ranch sets off a chain of jealousy, slander, and violence. Produced by William Fadiman for Columbia Pictures from Paul I. Wellman's 1939 novel Jubal Troop, the film is widely described as a loose reworking of Shakespeare's Othello and is noted for its location photography in Technicolor and CinemaScope against the Grand Tetons.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Release	New York opening 24 April 1956; general release May 1956; 100 minutes¹
Source	Based on the novel Jubal Troop by Paul I. Wellman (New York, 1939); working title Jubal Troop¹
Principal cast	Glenn Ford (Jubal Troop), Ernest Borgnine (Shep Horgan), Rod Steiger (Pinky), Valerie French (Mae Horgan), Felicia Farr (Naomi), Charles Bronson (Reb)⁴
Production	Columbia Pictures Corp.; produced by William Fadiman; screenplay by Russell S. Hughes and Delmer Daves; shot 28 July to 13 September 1955¹
Format	Technicolor, CinemaScope (2.55:1), RCA Sound Recording; music by David Raksin; cinematography by Charles Lawton Jr.¹
Filming location	The Grand Tetons, Wyoming¹
Critical standing	100% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 10 reviews; 77% audience score⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Jubal Troop, an itinerant cowhand who says he is dogged by bad luck, staggers out of the Wyoming high country and collapses from exhaustion. He is found by Shep Horgan, a crude but big-hearted rancher, who gives him refuge and a job. After Jubal proves himself by breaking a cantankerous bronco, Shep promotes him to foreman, displacing the former top hand, Pinky. Mae, Shep's young Canadian wife, unhappy in her marriage and formerly Pinky's lover, turns her attentions to Jubal, who rebuffs her out of loyalty to Shep and loves another woman, Naomi Hoktor, a member of a religious wagon train passing through the ranch.¹^•⁶

Driven by jealousy, Pinky plants in Shep's mind the suspicion that Jubal is carrying on with Mae, and Mae, wanting to hurt both the husband she does not love and the man who has spurned her, untruthfully confirms the story. Shep goes gunning for Jubal, and the situation moves toward treachery and murder.⁷ The traveling stranger Reb (Charles Bronson) offers Jubal his help, but it is up to Jubal to change his luck from bad to good.⁶

The Othello connection

Commentators have repeatedly described the film as Othello on the range. In this mapping, Borgnine's Shep is the Othello figure, Steiger's Pinky is the Iago figure who poisons his boss's mind with suspicions, French's Mae corresponds to Desdemona, and Ford's Jubal is the film's Cassio.²^•⁸ The Internet Shakespeare Editions database records the film as a derivative adaptation of Othello, noting that Wellman's novel is itself based on the play.⁹

The correspondence is loose rather than exact. The TCM essayist Jeremy Arnold writes that the detailed intricacies of Shakespeare's tragedy are absent and only the broad strokes remain, and his colleague Sean Axmaker argues that the film is less Shakespeare than Hollywood melodrama, noting that the plot details and motivations differ: Mae is no innocent, Pinky is her spurned lover, and the film's real center is the drifter caught between frustrated desires and desperate deceptions.²^•¹⁰ The Cinema Ritrovato catalog makes a similar point, judging Jubal much less faithful to its Shakespearean source than adaptations such as Johnny Hamlet or Joe Macbeth are to theirs.¹¹

Production

The project had a long gestation. According to trade-paper items from October 1942 and August 1943, the producer-director Sam Wood purchased the rights to Wellman's novel in 1942, intending to cast Gary Cooper and Irene Dunne in the lead roles; the film was eventually made by Daves at Columbia more than a decade later.¹ Daves and Russell S. Hughes adapted the first part of the novel, which runs from Indian fighting to oil drilling, and invented a backstory for Jubal that is not in the book; the Pinky role was not in the original novel either.¹² The Pinky part was intended as the first Western for Aldo Ray, who backed out at the last minute, earning a suspension from Columbia, and Steiger took the role.¹²

Onscreen credits read "introducing" for Valerie French and Felicia Farr, although French had already made a British film and Farr had previously appeared in other movies and on television; Jubal marked French's American debut and her first Hollywood role.¹^•² Charles Bronson, credited as Reb Haislipp, had recently shed his real last name, Buchinsky.²

Style and reception

Daves shot the film in the Grand Teton country of Wyoming, filling the widescreen frame with mountain backdrops, forests, and rolling hills while keeping the landscape subordinate to the human drama.¹⁰ He favors suspense over action: the tension tightens until Pinky pushes his boss over the edge, and the most brutal assault is left off screen.¹⁰ The Variety review praised "a constantly mounting suspense" and the performances, calling Borgnine excellent as the rough but gentle man and noting that Steiger "spews evil venom as the cowhand who wants the ranch and the rancher's wife."⁵^•¹² Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote a mixed review in verse, comparing the drama to "a plain, warmed-over Shane."¹²

A psychological Western. Jubal belongs to the wave of adult Westerns that flourished in the 1950s.¹⁰ It was the first of three Westerns Daves made in successive years with Glenn Ford, followed by 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and Cowboy (1958).¹³ In academic writing, Matthew Carter of Manchester Metropolitan University argues that the film, both formally and thematically, is more closely aligned with film noir than is generally acknowledged, and that its focus on repressed sexual desire and the plight of the main female protagonist justifies reading it as a critique of the excesses of patriarchal power.¹⁴ A 2022 essay on the three Daves-Ford Westerns argues that the films replace the traditional violent, non-verbal Western masculinity with a version that is verbal, compassionate, and considerate.¹⁵

Despite this critical attention, Daves himself was long under-recognized: auteur theory, which celebrated contemporaries such as Anthony Mann, John Ford, and Howard Hawks as Western directors, largely passed him by, and Kent Jones has called him a misunderstood and insufficiently appreciated figure in American film history.¹³

Restoration and home video

A team at Sony/Columbia under restoration specialist Grover Crisp carried out a restoration of the film, screened in the Treasures from the Film Archives program at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2010.³ The Criterion Collection issued the film on Blu-ray and DVD as Spine #656, with a new restored 4K digital transfer, uncompressed monaural soundtrack, English subtitles, and an essay by Kent Jones; the Blu-ray presents the film at its original aspect ratio of about 2.55:1.⁴^•¹⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns before 1980 › Released 1930 to 1960

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?