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A parley with Manifest Destiny, a second shot at John Smith and Pocahontas. Arizona, 1870, a humane gesture amid ongoing bloodshed, the Union soldier turned prospector (James Stewart) helps a wounded Apache boy and is shielded from a shower of arrows. "This white man is my friend!" The colleagues in Tucson are flabbergasted (and noose-happy) at the idea of harmony with savages, the reluctant scout perseveres and gets an audience with Cochise himself (Jeff Chandler). "To talk of peace is not hard. To live it is very hard." The chief is skeptical but an honorable bond grows, so does a romance with the maiden (Debra Paget) in a vision of Edenic fragility. Delmer Daves' first Western, erected upon a principle of radical simplicity: "Well, it is good to respect the ways of others." The dream of equality, the armistice threatened by bigoted townspeople and renegade braves, landscapes that shift from idyllic to treacherous in an instant. Chandler's Cochise is nobly bronzed, statuesque as if forever posing for a stamp, humorous beneath it all. (Jay Silverheels as his opposite number is briefly seen rejecting the pacifist approach, "from now on... I am Geronimo.") A documentarian's eye on tribal dances and rituals, alongside the Technicolor stylization of a tree decorated with dangling intruders and set ablaze. "My Bible says nothing about the pigmentation of the skin," declares the general whose enlightenment is tested in a wickiup with a meal of pony meat. Low angles for blue skies over the interracial couple's idyll, high angles for marauders scuttling across rock formations in the tragic ambush. "As I bear the murder of my people, so you will bear the murder of your wife." Stewart's glance of vengeful fury at the close is properly discouraged by Daves, and magnificently stoked subsequently by Mann. With Basil Ruysdael, Will Geer, Joyce MacKenzie, and Arthur Hunnicutt.
--- Fernando F. Croce |