Movie review – “Playhouse 90 – Without Incident” (1957) **1/2

This has a terrific opening sequence, with Errol as the head of a group of cavalry waiting for the Indians to attack while a woman (Ann Sheridan) sings 'Greensleaves'. And it’s a pretty good story - the Indians are after one of Errol’s prisoners, an Indian whom he’s escorting across country. Errol also faces local white settlers who aren’t keen on him stirring up trouble with the natives, a pair of sisters who were kidnapped by Indians (Sheridan and her nympho sister Julie London), and a mutinous bunch of soldiers (led by John Ireland, in his Red River type role performance as troublesome lieutenant).

Errol doesn’t look too crash hot – weather beaten and, surprisingly, a bit pudgy (something that tended to be disguised in his later movies because he usually wore suits all the time). It’s a different sort of character for him – a hated martinet who is willing to sacrifice the life of his men if it means keeping the Apaches at bay (the theme of the movie is sort of “we can’t back down to terrorists”.) He’s not bad – it’s not one of his best performances.

This is far from perfect – there is lots of Acting and Over Acting (especially by London and the bald guy who gets a crush on said nympho – he’s awful). Sheridan isn’t bad in a not-much role, but the role of the widowed leader of the townsfolk is quite good.

It suffers definitely from a low budget, which presumably hampered the ability to shoot decent action scenes – the quality of these is about on par of most 50s television. It’s quite mature that Flynn fails in his mission but there’s an awful scene at the end where Sheridan takes the blame for turning her sister into a woman of easy victue (Sheridan was a former dance hall girl aka hooker whose sister looked up to her). Also the Indians deciding not to attack at the end whiffs of deux ex machina and the ending is a bit irritating – Errol says he’s going to say in his report the trip was made “without incident”… but didn’t several of his soldiers die? How’s he going to explain that?

But you could count on Playhouse 90 to at least try to turn out something of quality, and they have a go. This is definitely Errol’s best television production – though not his best small screen performance, that would be The Golden Shanty.