|
Seventh
Cavalry
 
(Columbia
Pictures, 1956)
75 minutes, available only on VHS videocassette from Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee independent video store in North Hollywood, California. (find them on-line and call or order from their mail order catalogue)
Director -- Joseph H. Lewis. Starring -- Randolph Scott, Barbara Hale, Jay C. Flippen,
Jeanette Nolan, Frank Faylen.
 This
is one of Randolph Scott's best two-a-year B Westerns for Columbia from
the Fifties, directed by Joseph H. Lewis, a fine, low-budget filmmaker
with a reputation among cineasts for some of his film noir
dramas (Gun Crazy, 1949). Scott plays an Army officer who must prove he didn't desert
General Custer at the Little Bighorn battle. Consequently in its court martial scenes, Peter Packer's (of Juke
Box Jury fame) script delves into the historical facts of the lost
battle and its aftermath, when the Army sent out a burial detail to pick
up the bodies and personal belongings. The
love interest between Scott and Hale is inconsequential, but the
cinematography's good, Scott his usual stalwart self in this excellent
little B picture, the very first to deal with the results
of the 7th Cavalry's disastrous loss to Crazy Horse's Sioux. Based upon Glendon's short story, "A Horse For Mrs.
Custer," which is available in Easterns
and Westerns,
the Short Stories of Glendon Swarthout, from Michigan State University
press in 2001.
Reviews
"Hollywood hasn't produced many Westerns with the emotional
warmth of
7th Cavalry . . . Miss Hale makes a beautiful heroine
as the story builds up to a powerful impact and climatic
ending." Lansing, Michigan Journal
click
here for more pictures from the film Seventh
Calvary
|
