The critic Dilys Powell once said there were no bad westerns; there
were great westerns, there were good westerns and there were westerns
and I suppose you could say Sidney Salkow's film "Sitting Bull" falls
into the last category. As you might guess from the title it culminates
in the Battle of Little Bighorn which, given that this is fundamentally a
B-Movie western, is actually quite spectacularly handled while the
movie itself falls into that small group of films to offer a sympathetic view of the plight of the Native American.
J. Carrol Naish is Sitting Bull and Dale Robertson, the cavalry man
who's on the side of the Indians. Its view of history may be a little
off the wall but it's a perfectly accessible 'Cowboys & Indians'
picture which makes you wish it were better written and acted; the
on-again-off-again love affair between Robertson and Mary Murphy is
frankly embarrassing. Not a great western, then and maybe not even a
good western but as Dilys might say, not a bad one either
No comments:
Post a Comment