Director John Sturges moved up to A-pics on this plush M-G-M Western that ought to be better than it is. Something inimical about M-G-M ‘House Style’ and Westerns, with impressive location work undercut by crude soundstage ‘exteriors’ using painted cycloramas Col. Buffalo Bill would have sent back to the scenery department. Add on Eleanor Parker’s painted Leading Lady, John Forsythe’s lousy come-and-go Southern accent, a waterfall set a hop, skip & jump from desert vistas in Death Valley and you’ve lost half the battle before a camera turns. Yet what a lot of superb action comes thru in this tale of an isolated POW camp for captured Confederates, kept in line by tough, borderline sadistic Union Capt. William Holden, all of them surrounded by lethal Indians eager to savage outgoing escapees or incoming supply wagons. The neatly turned plot has Parker visiting for Polly Bergen’s wedding to officer Richard Anderson, but really there to run off with Forsythe and character actors John Lupton (the coward), William Campbell (the braggart) and an indispensable William Demarest (the sharpshooter). If only Parker & Holden didn’t upset the plan by sparking to each others’ flame! (Actually, these two don’t spark at all on screen; one more problem for Sturges to work around.) Bumpy going between the good stuff in the first two acts, but stick with it for a spectacular finale that uses more arrows than Kurosawa’s THRONE OF BLOOD and Olivier’s HENRY V combined. A jaw-dropping sequence.
DOUBLE-BILL: A big year for Holden who also broke the production Code in THE MOON IS BLUE (now unwatchable) and won an Oscar® for his other POW pic that year, STALAG 17.
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