In an era where civic duty and personal heroics are often conflated – or, more likely, confused – with clamorous projections of fantastical masculinity, it’s easy to mistake the phallic armory in Delmer Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma as symbols of power, cylindrical totems to androgenic potency that grant their wielders dominance and authority. After all, the film is largely concerned with such dynamics, and especially so with regards to how they fall across gender lines. It doesn’t require particularly strong observational acumen to feel the unease of one particular early scene, in which a gang of men leer explicitly at an insular female presence; the woman, a bartender, nervously pours drinks while the fellas ocularly objectify her, and both the words spoken and smoke exhaled seem to overtake the very nature of the saloon, turning the diorama into a smoldering balancing act of bestial fervor. In this, the threat of sexual violence is one felt as certain and real despite never being directly stated. The male gunslingers hold an implied power over the female barkeep, who has but a small wooden wall and a smidge of social courtesy protecting her; she’s literally in a position of subservience and vulnerability. But what about later – how are we to read an ensuing scene that depicts two men, outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) and farmer-cum-deputy Dan Evans (Van Heflin), engaged in a sweaty power tussle in a hotel bridal suite? That Ben is ultimately confined to a bed at the behest of Dan’s shotgun is telling, but incomplete – the dynamic present isn’t one of physicality or even metaphorical virility. Ideas of masculine symbolism are quickly nullified by the introduction of an outside agent, one that’s, in the face of archaic male-centric power structures, subversive to primal orders: money, and the tiered socioeconomic systems it abides.