This low-budget RKO western trips on a few too many cow patties, but it’s worth seeing for Barbara Stanwyck. In a better world, she would have played many more roles as a not-so-old-fashioned western hero. She looks good in the hat and the gun belt and is comfortable pulling a trigger. At age 46, her screen presence remains strong. The film flatters her further by casting Morris Ankrum, only eleven years older, as her father.
They’ve traveled from Texas to Montana with a herd of cattle and an arrangement to own some valuable land. Life is good until they get attacked by Native interlopers in the middle of the night, have their cows stolen and their entire crew turned into fertilizer. The villain behind it all: slimy businessman Gene Evans, who runs guns and whiskey to a rogue group of Indians in exchange for occasional dirty work. From there, Stanwyck divides her time between recovery, finding justice and, interestingly, getting over racial prejudice.
This production may be rushed and cheap and feature a wooden leading man (Ronald Reagan), but it’s on the shortlist of westerns of its time to cast a critical eye toward the convention of Cowboys vs. Indians. While it doesn’t measure up to modern standards of sensitivity (the “Natives” here are played by white actors given the usual make-up chair bronzing; also, it never acknowledges the irony of white people fighting for ownership of land stolen from the very people that they’re using as pawns in the game), it directly addresses provincial pressures against racial mixing in a scene of Lance Fuller facing criticism from his tribe for aiding white woman Stanwyck and a parallel scene of Stanwyck facing off against white townies who shun her for associating with an Injun.
Director Allan Dwan isn’t rioting in the streets over it, but he is acknowledging that there’s a problem. That’s more than you’ll get from most second-string genre flicks.
This is one of three films from Dwan released in 1954, which is probably why it’s slapped together in mostly mechanical master shots. See it anyway, along with one of his other films that year, the underrated (and much better) anti-McCarthy allegory Silver Lode. Visit Allan Dwan’s quiet revolution.