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The startling prelude compresses The Steel Helmet into one devastated tableau, Rod Steiger in soiled buckskin might be Gene Evans in combat except he's an Irishman in the Virginia infantry on Palm Sunday, 1865. (Scorched earth against cobalt skies, plus the title stamped in crimson.) Samuel Fuller chuckles at the notion of the Civil War's last bullet, he knows conflict is an ongoing facet of American identity—his "Johnny Sore-Loser" seethes as General Lee prepares to surrender (the vantage is from inside a blood-soaked medic's tent), then gathers his pride and hatred to seek a new nation "far west." Out in the desert with the Sioux, a rebirth of smoke and bloodied feet, a sense of wholeness with the tough squaw (Sara Montiel) until the return of the wannabe Custer (Ralph Meeker). "Maybe a broken neck is the best for what ails ya." The cantankerous relationship is with Ford, Drums Along the Mohawk and The Searchers in particular (Olive Carey portrays the mother with no answers), "to become American again" is the painful trajectory on divided terrain. Fuller slashes his own canvases for swift and grainy views, and populates them with philosophers and renegades: Jay C. Flippen as a weathered native scout with a canteen of whiskey and no stomach for politics, Charles Bronson's oiled-up torso in the middle of a discourse on faith (cf. Buñuel's Robinson Crusoe), Brian Keith as a saddle-sore Yankee captain with an Edward Everett Hale tale. Eternal battle lines, a blasting rendition of "I'm a Good Old Rebel" by a moon-faced banjoist, deliverance as a gunshot to the head after a fort raid. "The end of this story can only be written by you." The road leads not to Little Big Man or Dances with Wolves, but to Antonio das Mortes and Le Vent d'est. Cinematography by Joseph Biroc. With H.M. Wynant, Neyle Morrow, Frank DeKova, Tim McCoy, Stuart Randall, and Billy Miller.
--- Fernando F. Croce |