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The westward rush, "Old World blood and colonial strains." Dakota in the 1870s is a scrubby valley watched by the Sioux and lined with eager pilgrims, one caravan carries the Virginian cowgirl (Olive Borden) and the Irish buckaroo (George O'Brien). A rapid montage of bounty posters dissolves to the trio of outlaws (Tom Santschi, J. Farrell MacDonald, Frank Campeau) silhouetted against rocky formations, inveterate desert rats and basically softies despite a certain propensity for holding up stagecoaches. "Our business is gettin' crowded," too many cutthroats nowadays, they join travelers in Custer City and become jesters, matchmakers, mangy guardian angels. John Ford in his innate territory between Cruze's The Covered Wagon and Walsh's The Big Trail, with a dazzling eye for intricate set-ups. His America is a land still in fragments, a country of stampedes finding its inner balance: Frames are composed with the continuous bustle of people and vehicles, and then there's the stillness of a congregation moments before a wagon set ablaze crashes through the church wall. History is vaudeville when it isn't tall-tale, MacDonald's caterpillar eyebrows and Campeau's cardsharp slyness under a stovepipe hat are irrepressible comic magnifications while the wrathful Santschi smashing through door after door is a flash of Paul Bunyan. A vengeful bullet is saved for the corrupt sheriff with dandified bullwhip (Lou Tellegen), but the plow remains as emblematic as the six-shooter, "the real wealth is soil." The land rush is filmed with the camera amid charging hooves and a touch of Remington, the bandits' resigned serenity in their final stand is absorbed by Peckinpah. "One last riddle, positively the last." The coda equates desperadoes and infants as Eden's precarious hope, just the conclusion for a Biblical sagebrush. With Priscilla Bonner, Otis Harlan, Phyllis Haver, and Alec Francis. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |