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Delmer Daves has a little joke to begin this inverted Broken Arrow, the Indian fighter from Oregon (Alan Ladd) befuddled by a laconic sentry outside the White House, "just walk right in." President Grant (Hayden Rorke) needs a commissioner of peace out West, where the depredations of one Captain Jack (Charles Bronson) widen the divide between settlers and the Modoc. (The cut from a crimson Washington interior out of Matisse to a mountainous frontier vista is a virtual WarnerColor screen test.) Medals and military uniforms fascinate the indigenous renegade, he wears a torn Cavalry tunic to go with his "warpath look" and beams when the death of one of his men allows him to launch a series of massacres. His ways are disowned by other Modocs, including the solicitous maiden (Marisa Pavan) who vies with the colonel's niece (Audrey Dalton) for the emissary's affections. "She's learning history first hand!" A treatise on Cold War appeasement transposed to 1872, derived from Ford's Fort Apache and played on vast arrangements of rock and vegetation. Bleeding-heart Reverend Doctor (Richard Gaines) and vengeful stagecoach driver (Robert Keith) give the civilized poles, "jackasses of mighty different colors," the battle with Captain Jack dissolves from a screenful of hollering braves to a caravan of silhouetted soldiers limping at dusk. Diplomacy in the wilderness, risks crystallized in the ominous hush that suddenly falls over an open-air powwow gathering. "Think they're bluffing?" "We find out if they start shooting." The malefactor goes to the gallows, though not before an impromptu theological discussion all but reprised in Buñuel's Robinson Crusoe. With Rodolfo Acosta, Warner Anderson, Elisha Cook Jr., Anthony Caruso, Edgar Stehli, Frank DeKova, Willis Bouchey, Frank Ferguson, Peter Hansen, Isabel Jewell, and Strother Martin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |