Hey Elizabeth! I am glad you are having a good time at the museum and getting to see so much art. I liked the painting of President Obama in the garden setting. Once again the timing is perfect, as he was back in the news yesterday in a big way. I imagine you are also sightseeing the National Mall and all the requisite sites. Man.......I can't wait to go myself. I love American history and would like to travel to the east coast to take a Colonial Tour of sorts. Really, I'd love to take about a year and just drive all around America and take my time, see as much of the country as I could. And I will do it too, one day. Maybe not drive around for a whole year, but for an extended period. All I need is for someone to go with me. :)
I am "so over" (as they say) doing things all by myself, lol.
One thing that is not too terrible to do by oneself is to watch a movie, and tonight's film was a good old B-Western from yet another dvd collection of such, this time a two disc set of 7 movies, none of which I had seen or heard of, which equates to a big Yippee! on my part. It was called "The Black Dakotas" (1954), yet another tale based on the tumultuous history between the Sioux and the United States and the latter's unrelenting attempts to get the Sioux out of the Black Hills, by treaty or by force.
In "The Black Dakotas", which takes place in 1860 at the start of the Civil War, the stone-faced but handsome Gary Merrill plays a Southern Rebel who is part of a plot to divert Union Troops, which are massed in the South, to northern Indian territories like the Dakotas. That way, the Union military strength will be weakened, to the Confederate advantage. To achieve this objective, Merrill and his small group of land owning conspirators plot to inflame tensions in the Black Hills between the Sioux Indians and local white settlers, by having Merrill impersonate an agent of the US Government who is sent by Abraham Lincoln to offer a peace treaty to the Sioux. The Rebs kill the real agent, and now Merrill pretends to be him, so that he can offer the treaty to the Indians, and then break it.
His plan is to trick the Sioux with a false, broken treaty, so that they will go on the warpath against local whites in the Dakotas. This action will, in turn, cause Union Army troops to be diverted to the territory to restore peace, and the diversion of those troops will in turn cause an imbalance in the Union forces in the Southern states where the Civil War is being fought, as mentioned above.
So as usual it is one hell of a plot, and the superb Hollywood craftsman Ray Nazarro, who we have seen a lot of lately, get the whole job done in 65 minutes, telling a large amount of story in the process.
The talented Wanda Hendrix - Audie Murphy's first wife, who we just saw in an adolescent role in the fabulous "Foreign Correspondent" - here plays the daughter of the head plotter of the Rebel faction, who is caught, tried and hanged. Her loyalty is torn between avenging her father and remaining allied to the cause of peace between the white townspeople and the Indians, a cause supported by her boyfriend who owns the local stagecoach line.
There are a few instances of stilted dialogue at the beginning of the film, and an implausible rescue attempt of her boyfriend by Hendrix near the end, but overall the movie is reasonably well acted, especially in the scenes depicting the meetings between the Sioux chief and the Union impersonators led by Merrill. These have a feeling of real authenticity. The Technicolor print is in above average condition, and again - it is not easy to tell a Ton Of Story in 65 minutes, which is why no one tries it nowdays, but Ray Nazarro was a master of short form Westerns, and other styles as well.
Two Regular Sized Thumbs Up then, for "The Black Dakotas", as solid a B-Western as you could ask for, with a realistic script, and best of all - filmed on location at Iverson Ranch, and Corriganville, and also Burro Flats on the property of what is now the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, where all the NASA rocket engines were tested.
So there you have it for the news of the day. Good singing will be had in church in the morning.
See you then. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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