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André De Toth stages the opening massacre as a quiet night razed by fire and stampeding horses, then gives the view of the survivors on the unending prairie under a pale sky. "Maybe we're lucky. Maybe we're not." Cavalry sergeant (Broderick Crawford) leads what's left of the platoon, with the renegade Comanche chief (John War Eagle) on their trail. An officer's sister (Barbara Hale) and a liquor salesman (Chubby Johnson) are among the stagecoach passengers found along the way, the trooper (Lloyd Bridges) has unfinished business with the gun-runner (Hugh Sanders), the Spanish mission in ruins is a tenuous oasis. Siege in the dunes while waiting for reinforcements, "a hundred-to-one shot." "Being a gambler, I like those odds." Korda's Sahara is the basis, De Toth locates his own barbed miniatures of survival and death in the desert. Silhouetted figures at sunrise, a wall of dynamite explosions during a skirmish, life as fragile as water drops at the bottom of an abandoned well. "She was wearin' star-spangled tights and I was drinkin' a beer," the dream beauty remembered by the sentry (Mickey Shaughnessy) in an anecdote abruptly curtailed by an arrow. (In the harsh terrain, the most romantic gesture boils down to Hale unfastening the flap of Crawford's gun holster before his palaver with the enemy.) At the center lies the contrast between the sergeant's hardened experience and the youthful vulnerability of the Kiowa boy (Johnny Stewart), characteristic of the humanism behind the director's steeliness. "With or without a scalp?" The finale shows how keenly Ford's The Lost Patrol is called into play. With Steve Forrest, George Matthews, Ric Roman, Martin Milner, Milton Parsons, and Carleton Young.
--- Fernando F. Croce |