Try saying the title three times quickly. Canada’s most exotic-sounding state is the inspiration behind this colourful adventure, which benefits from some stunning location work and pretty visuals of mounties set against green trees. Alan Ladd made it during his 18 month sojourn outside the US in order to qualify for tax exemption (he also shot three films for Warwick Productions in England, but Saskatchewan was made for Universal). Ladd plays a mountie, of course – though this reveal is delayed until the eleventh minute and he spends some time in buckskins.
The film is set in 1877 with the mounties having to deal with Crazy Horse and his gang of Sioux who have crossed the border after fighting with Custer and are threatening to stir up the local Cree Indians. Because this was post-Broken Arrow Hollywood, Ladd has a right-on attitude towards Indians – he clashes with his stuffy new English commander and a nasty US marshall over Ladd’s more tolerant attitudes towards them, and Ladd was raised by Indians and is blood brother to a Cree Indian (Jay Silverheels, though in the opening sequence Ladd is still shown to outshoot and outrace said blood brother).
Also the motivations for the Indian rising is sympathetically depicted – the government take the guns of the Cree away, meaning they can not hunt, and driving them into the arms of the Sioux. (Indeed there is a slight anti-American flavour to the story – the American US marshall character is a nasty piece of work, and the Canadian treatment of Cree Indians is held up several times as superior to American treatment of the Sioux).
Most of the plot concerns a bunch of mounties travelling through hostile country escorting a prisoner. Ladd ends up leading a mutiny against his cowardly English commander but that’s resolved quite politely and most of the white man conflict involves the US marshal being nasty, which gets tiresome after a while.
Sometimes you feel as though the filmmakers thought “right we’ve got these splendid visuals of red coats against green tree backdrops we don’t really need much of a story”. I suppose they were right. There is some okay action – a few attacks, a chase on canoes reminiscent of the later Last of the Mohicians. The mounties and the Crees unite at the end to defeat the Sioux – its hard to feel overly roused.
Shelley Winters is an odd choice for romantic lead (the prisoner); she doesn’t quite work with her sing-song character actor voice. Because it’s set in Canada there’s an inevitable whisky-drinking French Canadian trapper as comic relief.
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