TROOPER HOOK (1957)

In the last of six films together, Joel McCrea finally got top-billing over co-star Barbara Stanwyck.  It was hardly worth the wait.  A modest, by-the-numbers indie Western with an anti-racist message typical of the period (Native Americans doing double-duty as a less politically contentious stand-in for Blacks), but, in the hands of director Charles Marquis Warren, it’s largely undistinguished (or should that be indistinguishable?) over a flood racially progressive Westerns.  And while Warren had an undeniable knack for developing long-running tv Western series (GUNSMOKE, THE VIRGINIAN, RAWHIDE), a feel for the pace & variety needed for features was missing.  As if his imagination was as compressed as the gray-scale favored on old tv Westerns.  (Lucky here to have uncompressed cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks.)   Hard not to think of half a dozen Western specialists who might have made more on this story of terrorizing Indian Chief Nanchez (Rodolfo Acosta) whose capture frees Stanwyck’s kidnaped ‘squaw’ of the last eight years and their little boy.  Now McCrea’s soon-to-retire Cavalry Sargent, charged with delivering them to her ‘real’ husband (John Dehner), finds he’s growing attached to them in his gruff, military manner.  McCrea particularly good working thru the tough/tender clichés;, Stanwyck having a harder time, especially after a blown introduction where she looks powdered and neat as a pin amid Indians taken after a military loss.  She only partially recovers; and you can’t help noticing all the missed dramatic opportunities.  But credit for a lack of condescension these progressive ‘50s films offered as corrective to decades of Indian slaughter.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Treating the American Indian as frontier terrorist, though common enough in programmers & Western serials, is seen less in A-list films than you may imagine.  They tended to mourn the disappearance of America’s ‘noble savage’ as if they were a species gone extinct.  Which attitude more dismissive?  Discuss.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  On DVD or streaming, TROOPER usually defaults to Academy ratio (1 : 1.37), as it was shot.  But the film was designed to be cropped down (via screen scrims or an aperture plate in the projector) to about 1.77.  So, if your set up allows, feel free to enlarge one step.  Just don’t use the anamorphic setting.