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A cow grazing on the cabin's roof announces the surrealism at play, swiftly intensified by the Cavalry specter "like something blown in by the wind." Settlers and Kiowas in the Texas panhandle, between them the foundling (Audrey Hepburn) adopted by the widow (Lillian Gish) and in love with the stepbrother (Burt Lancaster). The frontier is a stew of prejudice, not much is needed for it to boil over, say, a cracked prophet (Joseph Wiseman) warbling "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in a dust storm. "You run from the truth," it catches up with a noose around the neck, "Injun blood." John Huston's Gothic opera from the author of The Searchers, a purge of the genre's ugly tensions at the crossroads of the classical and the modern. Parley at breakfast, braves offering to trade horses for the heroine, she admires the chief's beauty to the matriarch's consternation. "Why don't you give her a try, paleface?" Charles Bickford as the religionist partner hobbles on crutches made from rifles, Audie Murphy pushes into psychosis a study started in The Red Badge of Courage. The groom (Albert Salmi) is a yokel who takes an arrow to the back while in the afterglow of the proposal, racial panic reaches a pinnacle with a dazed Gish cradling a pot of scrawny flowers while Hepburn ponders her mirror reflection with ash smeared like war paint. "A man sets down roots. He don't like them cut off, by Indians or anyone else." A nexus of associations past and future, Griffith's leading lady back in the besieged ranch long since The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, John Saxon like Jack Nicholson in the Hellman wasteland. The girl goes bird-watching after shooting down the Kiowa who cries "sister," just the hollow Happy Ending for the new decade. Cinematography by Franz Planer. With June Walker, Kipp Hamilton, Arnold Merritt, Doug McClure, and Carlos Rivas.
--- Fernando F. Croce |