WARNING: spoilers.
Guy Madison plays Frank Madden, a man who is half-Indian and half-white and who hides his Indian heritage in order to fit into white society. He's sick of the way Indians have been treated, banished to reservations and not having the same rights as the conquering white men. His goal is to be somebody by owning something of his own---in this case, land.
After much effort he buys an old ranch outside of town, and problems begin. His neighbors---the nasty Shipley brothers---don't take kindly to the fact that he is fencing off his property. They have been using it as grazing land for free since the previous owners abandoned it.
The rest of the movie is about his dealings with Neil, Bert, and Tom Shipley, his denial of his Indian heritage, and his relationship (poorly developed) with an attractive white woman in town. Prejudice, tyranny, fear, stubbornness, and insecurity are constant themes. So is poor acting. Madden acts as if he were mad at everyone, including Indians, and speaks mostly in anger. OK, he has a chip on his shoulder, but it's way overdone here, seeming laughable at times. Maybe in the mid-1950s that counted as drama.
A scene near the end that made me wince. It was one of those improbable 'one man against the town' scenes that appear in a lot of westerns. In this case the one man is the sheriff. Madden has been jailed for his own protection after the evil Bert and Neil Shipley claim that he killed their brother Tom (he didn't). A mob led by Bert and Neil arrives at the jail and demands that the sheriff hand over Madden so it can administer its own justice: a rope. Not a single man of the town offers to help the sheriff quell the mob. He has at least one deputy, but I didn't see or hear him in that scene. If he were there and I missed him, so be it, but I think he was down in the saloon thinking about his insignificant part in the movie.
Another scene was a pleasant curiosity. Two men are riding horses along a street in the town, and as the camera pans to the right to follow them, you can see that they are riding downhill. In almost every western I've seen, the town streets were flat as a squashed rattlesnake---no hills. This was a refreshing change from the norm, although it was probably an accident of choice of movie set rather than a conscious effort to insert a slope into a plot.
To the credit of the writers and director, I have to say that the movie treats Indians as human beings, rather than taking the low road and using the stereotype of bloodthirsty savages. Too bad the protagonist couldn't relate to them---or to most people for that matter---until a tragedy near end of the story.
Balancing the portrayal of Indians against my disappointments, I'll give it a 5.
Guy Madison plays Frank Madden, a man who is half-Indian and half-white and who hides his Indian heritage in order to fit into white society. He's sick of the way Indians have been treated, banished to reservations and not having the same rights as the conquering white men. His goal is to be somebody by owning something of his own---in this case, land.
After much effort he buys an old ranch outside of town, and problems begin. His neighbors---the nasty Shipley brothers---don't take kindly to the fact that he is fencing off his property. They have been using it as grazing land for free since the previous owners abandoned it.
The rest of the movie is about his dealings with Neil, Bert, and Tom Shipley, his denial of his Indian heritage, and his relationship (poorly developed) with an attractive white woman in town. Prejudice, tyranny, fear, stubbornness, and insecurity are constant themes. So is poor acting. Madden acts as if he were mad at everyone, including Indians, and speaks mostly in anger. OK, he has a chip on his shoulder, but it's way overdone here, seeming laughable at times. Maybe in the mid-1950s that counted as drama.
A scene near the end that made me wince. It was one of those improbable 'one man against the town' scenes that appear in a lot of westerns. In this case the one man is the sheriff. Madden has been jailed for his own protection after the evil Bert and Neil Shipley claim that he killed their brother Tom (he didn't). A mob led by Bert and Neil arrives at the jail and demands that the sheriff hand over Madden so it can administer its own justice: a rope. Not a single man of the town offers to help the sheriff quell the mob. He has at least one deputy, but I didn't see or hear him in that scene. If he were there and I missed him, so be it, but I think he was down in the saloon thinking about his insignificant part in the movie.
Another scene was a pleasant curiosity. Two men are riding horses along a street in the town, and as the camera pans to the right to follow them, you can see that they are riding downhill. In almost every western I've seen, the town streets were flat as a squashed rattlesnake---no hills. This was a refreshing change from the norm, although it was probably an accident of choice of movie set rather than a conscious effort to insert a slope into a plot.
To the credit of the writers and director, I have to say that the movie treats Indians as human beings, rather than taking the low road and using the stereotype of bloodthirsty savages. Too bad the protagonist couldn't relate to them---or to most people for that matter---until a tragedy near end of the story.
Balancing the portrayal of Indians against my disappointments, I'll give it a 5.