MGM had a big hit with Stewart Granger and Robert Taylor as feuding men of action whose day job involves slaughtering animals in All the Brothers Were Valiant so had another crack at it here. Dore Schary decided to produce personally, and the movie shows his erratic commercial sense, no matter the quality of the novel on which its based.
There are so many problems with this film. It's about buffalo hunters, which is hardly sympathetic to start off with - Granger, the hero, is disgusted by shooting buffalo... but he still does it. The villain, Robert Taylor, is meant to be a baddy because he gets off on killing buffalo and people - but Granger still kills a whole bunch, too. To make it worse the filmmakers throw in all this footage of buffalo genuinely being shot (taken from a cull, but it's still not easy to watch).
The relationship between Granger and Taylor is problematic because they only meet at the beginning of the film - there's no history or familial link. And Taylor's clearly a psycho from the beginning so Granger is not only an idiot for going into business with him, he's a coward for not dealing with his psycho partner a lot earlier. If Granger and Taylor had had a long history, and Taylor had saved his life, or if they'd been brothers, his hesitation would have made some sense - but it doesn't here.
I get that Taylor wants a friend and indeed his neediness for Granger is sometimes touching (as well as carrying standard 50s Western homoerotic overtones) but there is nothing ever we see in why Granger would need Taylor.
The supporting characters are flawed. The minute I saw Lloyd Nolan hobble on screen, monologuing and boozing I thought "oh no here we go... a wise old alcoholic character" and yep sure enough that's what we end up with. He's meant to be some sort of moral conscience I think but he goes along with the buffalo slaughter and Taylor turning Debra Paget into a sex slave until the very end (I did feel his death scene was very effective, though).
Russ Tamblyn is not only a highly unlikely half-Indian, his presence in the movie feels kind of pointless. I kept waiting for him to be this dramatic wild card - he reverts to Indian ways or betrays his people, or become a Taylor acolyte (which would have been great, actually, and made Granger's reluctance to act more understandable, i.e. it was too risky) - but he just hangs around watching on passively most of the time.
Debra Paget's Indian girl is a classic example of 50s liberal non-racism racism. The movie takes this we-should-be-nice-to-the-Indians stance common of movies of the time - this had been stock since Broken Arrow really. Yet Indians are mostly depicted as weak and spineless and Paget's character isn't even given a name - she's called "Indian girl". And she's this passive thing who goes along and basically agrees to become Taylor's concubine for safety, bats her eyes at Granger until he takes possession of her as well. It's a horrible part.
Dramatically there are other problems too - there's no shoot out at the end between the leads, to which I'm guessing the thinking was "this'll be unexpected" which it is but it's also unsatisfying. There's this long sequence where Granger returns to civilisation and wears a suit and gets in a brawl and flirts with a dance hall girl that looks simply ridiculous.
And as for the leads... Well, Robert Taylor isn't bad and it's interesting to see him play the villain. He should really have played the hero and Granger the villain - Granger made a superb baddy - but I'm guessing they wanted to mix it up. Fans of Taylor and Granger are really the only people who should definitely check this out (apart from Richard Brooks and Western completists).
Granger suits cowboy garb quite well, though in some scenes he goes over the top chewing on a cigar and talking like a cowboy. Their performances do anchor the movie and provide some of the best things about it. Also impressive is the location work in Dakota, and MGM 50s production values. But in general this movie just annoyed me.
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