by Republic Pictures
Sales Rank: 22429
Price: $9.98
This 1956 movie is alot like the 1939 Stagecoach.While it is not as good,it is interesting.
Viewer Reviews Most movie guides -general and specialist-give this movie a bad rep.It is frequently dismissed as "Stagecoach" lite-a variation on stage passengers under attack from marauding Indians .Yes there are similarities and yes this is inferior to John Ford's groundbreaking 1939 masterpiece,but it does not merit the opprobrium heaped upon it by critics .
It is a movie of two halves .It opens when John Banner (Dale Robertson)is shot and left for dead by his two partners in a bank robbery.He is not in fact dead and makes his way on foot to a nearby town wherre he settles accounts with the backshooting pair .A motley group is assembled in town awaiting the arrival of the Laramie stage .The noisiest is a US Senator (Ward Bond)a moralising sententious bore who maunders on at great length about the need to adopt a more liberal policy towards Indians rathet than agree with the majority sentiment that wants troops despatched to the region .There is a glamourous entertainer (Linda Darnell)and her accompanist (Regis Toomey),not to mention Hamilton(John Lund)who seems to have an unusually deep interest in Banner ,to the extent of watching him like a hawk. Despite the arrival of the stage showing evidence of an Indian attack the group sets out by stage only to lose a wheel and have the horses bolt .They come under siege and are trapped in a dried out stream bed .Their Indian adversaries alternately try full on assault and starvation/thirst to destroy the group which is gradually whittled down to just 2 survivors .
The final message is one of redemption and hope .The script is over wordy at times but the compensations are many -good colour photography by Ernest Haller,whose lighting skills saw him garner an Oscar for Gone With the Wind and whose work here shows the usually lacklustre Trucolor process at its best ,and a raft of better than average performances from a good cast.The action is well staged and this is a better than average B-Western
