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3 Godfathers is a 1948 American Western film in Technicolor directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz and Harry Carey Jr. The screenplay was written by Frank S. Nugent and Laurence Stallings based on the 1913 short story The Three Godfathers by Peter B. Kyne. The story is a loose retelling of the biblical Three Wise Men in an American Western context.
It is a remake of the black and white 1929 movie Hell's Heroes, starring Charles Bickman, Raymond Hatton, and Fred Kohler, directed by William Wyler.
Contents
Plot
Three rustlers—Bob Hightower, Pete and The Abilene Kid—ride into Welcome, Arizona. They have a friendly conversation with Sheriff Buck Sweet and his wife, who asks if they have seen her niece and her husband on the trail. The three subsequently rob the local bank, but the loot is lost when Kid is shot and his horse falls. They flee into the desert on two horses, pursued by Sweet and his men in a buckboard. Sweet shoots a hole in their water bag and then turns back to the depot.
The fugitives come within sight of the railroad's water tank at Apache Wells, only to see Sweet station guards there. Doubling back to Terrapin Tanks, a granite sump at the edge of the desert, the robbers lose their horses in a sandstorm. Desperate for water, they find the tanks dynamited by a tenderfoot, who disappeared chasing his thirsting horses. In a covered wagon nearby lies the man's wife—Sweet's niece—who is in labor. While Pete helps with the delivery, the other two laboriously collect water from nearby cacti. Many hours later, the woman has a boy, whom she names "Robert William Pedro Hightower" after her benefactors. Before dying, she exacts a promise from them to save him and be his godfathers.
