Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Escape From Fort Bravo, 1953


There’s a great story, spectacular photography, and some real suspense in this Fifties western filmed in Death Valley, California. The year is 1863 and the Fort Bravo of the title is an Army stockade in the Arizona desert. It’s being used as a prison camp for captured Confederate soldiers.

Plot. William Holden is captain of the fort's troop and second in command. We first see him riding in with an escaped prisoner, who is on foot and at the end of a rope. Holden is a cold man and carries out his duties with a machine-like authority. Besides enduring the contempt of the prisoners, he has Mescalero Indians to worry about. They burn supply wagons and torture the drivers before leaving them to die under the desert sun.

Holden’s reserve begins to melt when Eleanor Parker arrives at the fort to attend the wedding of the Colonel’s daughter. Little does he know that she’s there to help a Confederate captain (John Forsythe) make an escape. Parker does some heavy flirting with Holden, who in a matter of days begins putting the pressure on her to marry him. But when she disappears with Forsythe and two other prisoners, Holden discovers he’s been fooled.

Eleanor Parker, John Forsythe
The escaped prisoners don’t get far. Holden and a lieutenant catch up with them, and all head back to the fort. But before long, they are surrounded by more Mescaleros than you can count. Pinned down in a shallow depression, they withstand wave after wave of attacks by the Indians.

The prisoners are given arms, and fight side by side with Holden. But they can dodge arrows only for so long, as one by one the casualties accumulate. Eventually, the cavalry shows up to rescue them, and Forsythe’s character dies, leaving Holden and Parker to patch up.

Four stars. Cinematographer Robert Surtees gets credit for the fine look of this widescreen film shot in Ansco Color. The location photography is pretty breathtaking. The exterior scenes shot on the sound stage, however, are not much of a match. A fistfight in what looks like an amusement park water feature rings particularly false.

Director John Sturges, in an impressive Hollywood career, would go on to make some western classics, including Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957) and The Magnificent Seven (1960). His work here is thoroughly professional, especially in the action sequences.

William Demerast, John Forsythe, and William Campbell
Holden and Parker are good together, especially in the earlier scenes as the chemistry begins to work between them. The script, however, is too often soapy and clichéd. You begin to hear the lines coming before someone speaks them.

In supporting roles are William Campbell and William Demarest as Confederate soldiers who escape with Forsythe. Campbell had a long career, mostly in TV, with a one-season series Cannonball (1958-59) in which he played a long-haul truck driver. Demerast was Uncle Charley in 215 episodes of the TV series My Three Sons (1965-1972). John Forsythe would go on to star in several TV series much better suited to his suavely polished persona, including Bachelor Father (1957-1962), Charlie’s Angels (1976-1981), and Dynasty (1981-1989).

Escape From Fort Bravo is currently available at netflix and amazon. For more of Tuesday’s Overlooked Movies, head on over to Todd Mason’s blog.

Coming up: Old West glossary, no. 38

16 comments:

  1. You do really great movie reviews.

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  2. I believe I caught the second half of this on TV once, years ago. I remember being impressed by the Indians' technique of landing arrows right where they wanted them. Does that have any basis in fact, do you think, or was it a Hollywood invention?

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    1. I was impressed by that, too. I have no idea if it's historical.

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  3. Who knew there were so many movies made.

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  4. William Holden and Eleanor Parker, first-class actors, can't go wrong with this one.

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  5. I saw this at the age of 11 at the Broad Theater in Trenton, NJ. A quarter well spent. I've since seen it a few time on TV. A superior western.

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    1. As always, I am impressed by your memory, Walker.

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  6. What a fine review of a fine film. Skill with bows and arrows varied sharply by tribe. Among the most gifted were the Comanches. I'm not sure the Mescalero Apaches had that skill or the woods needed (such as Osage orange for bows.)

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  7. Great review. I believe I have watched this one but would like to watch again after reading what you had to say about it.

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  8. I don't think I have watched this film and would like to see it for its Civil War context. Have the Confederates ever been shown in good light, in books and films? The Union always seems to be winning, even in many of the (western) comic-books I have read.

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    1. Prashant, the South and Southerners have been portrayed more sympathetically in western fiction, I think. Remember, too, that Texas was a Confederate state. Mid-century Hollywood westerns had a more Northern bias, reflecting textbook American history.

      In more recent movie westerns, that has shifted. Consider Eastwood's THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES and Tom Selleck's CROSSFIRE TRAIL, based on a Louis L'Amour novel.

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  9. I once did an informal running count of the sympathies of western heroes, and overwhelmingly, they were Confederates, and most often from Missouri. At one point I actually wondered whether I was alone among my western genre fiction colleagues in choosing Union protagonists.

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  10. Ron, thanks to you and Richard S. Wheeler for your responses. These are issues I didn't pay much attention to when I read western fiction early on. That's one Eastwood film I haven't seen yet, though I ought to have done so a long time ago, or even the Selleck film for that matter.

    I'm currently reading an ebook on the Civil War (as part of my plan to read as many as I can owing to my interest in the subject) and the first thing I realised is that you need to know your geography well, especially where the eleven southern states are concerned. Richard mentioned Missouri which I have since found played a decisive role in the war, on both sides of the divide. I suppose being a border state had a lot to do with it.

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    1. A comment from Richard some time ago made me more aware of this. Both of us could have mentioned THE VIRGINIAN itself, which has a cowboy hero from a Southern state...The border states are interesting because political sympathies were so mixed. With outlaws like the James Brothers, Missouri also qualifies as a "western" state.

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  11. I once considered doing an article arguing that Westerns are really Southerns, not only because of the Confederate sympathies of the protagonists but because they incorporate cavalier southern values. Gunfighter stories are almost all set in the South or Southwest. The South continues to be the biggest market for westerns.

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