Is there a better producer than Robert J. Lippert? I'm starting to think the answer is "no", especially after our second classic Lippert Western in three days, "Little Big Horn"(1952), not the Custer story this time, but that of a troop who were sent to warn him of the impending massacre. Lloyd Bridges stars as "Capt. Phillip Donlin", who, as the movie opens, is about to lose his wife to a retiring officer, "Lt. John Haywood" (John Ireland). Donlin's wife "Celie" (Marie Windsor) hates that he is always away on patrol, telling friends, "I didn't marry him, I married a uniform." But Haywood is set to remedy her loneliness. He's completed his Army commitment and now, though his fellow officers and their wives think he's a scoundrel, he's about to retire, become a civilian, and take Celie back East. He loves her and that's all there is to it. This subplot only exists to create initial tension between the two men, because Captain Donlin knows Lt. Haywood is stealing his wife and is resigned to it, but he still hates Haywood's guts. And now, before Haywood can retire, he's sent by the General on one final mission, to call Donlin's troop back to camp, because scouts have discovered that 4000 Sioux are headed for Little Big Horn, and it's gonna be a massacre if they go there. We never see Celie Donlin again. As noted, the character is only used to create a rivalry.
Lt. Haywood rides out to give Donlin the message, but the Captain decides on the spot to disobey it. "We aren't going to leave General Custer and the 7th to get slaughtered." "But Captain, it's an order, and your dozen men won't make a difference anyway." "We will if we can get there first and warn Custer off."
That's the plan, and Donlin, being Haywood's superior, orders him to come along. "I see," muses Haywood, "It's your perfect chance to do me in." Donlin denies it, "If I wanted you dead, I'd have you riding point. You make my blood boil, I'll admit that, but right now I need you in the back, pushing the stragglers." Haywood had asked that his troops be free to leave, since it's gonna be a turkey shoot for the Sioux, but all of his men volunteered to stick around, so Donlin tasks him with keeping them in line. Donlin's as hard of a hard-ass as they come, because he subscribes 100% to the Army's maxim that it's better to lose a few lives to save many. In this case, it's gonna be his men's lives, and Haywood's, but he's determined to reach the Little Big Horn river, 400 miles away, before General Custer can get there, in order to to warn him off. Four thousand Sioux will trump Custer's force. Better to sacrifice some of his own men if he can arrive first, Donlin thinks, but it's gonna be a tough crawl, over rocky and desolate Corriganville terrain, speckled with plots of smoke-signaling Indians, knife-armed and savage as all get-out.
The troops are the varied group you'd expect, though none are at first disgruntled. There's "Peter Grierson" (Reed Hadley), a former Civil War Major who had to accept a demotion to Sergeant to remain in the post-war Army. Once a ranking officer, he's now at Donlin's beck and call. Wally Cassell (Oscar caliber in the boxing movie "Breakdown" a couple weeks ago) plays "Pvt. Danny Zecca", who's under arrest for going awol. He keeps getting sent on point as a result, and has to fight Indians alone. You could call this a 23rd Psalm movie, all about walking through hell with the Lord as your shepherd, only in this case, the shepherd is not benevolent. Captain Donlin has only one goal, warning Custer and his 7th cavalry away from Little Big Horn, and thereby saving hundreds of troops, even if it means sacrificing his own. Lloyd Bridges plays it ultra cold blooded, and his men finally disobey. If it was "Platoon", they'd have fragged him, but things hadn't gotten that bad in 1876. Lt. Haywood meanwhile, has volunteered to ride point as penance, having realized that he did wrong by stealing Donlin's wife, while Donlin was out in the wilderness fighting Indians. Different characters save the troop's bacon at different stages of the trail. Their horses are so fatigued that they won't lie down, knowing by instinct that if they do, they won't be able to get back up.
Captain Donlin leaves one wounded man to die alone, with his skin scraped off after being dragged by his horse. "Sorry Moylan, but we've gotta keep pushing forward." He allows Moylan to be placed in the shade (to die), but doesn't even give him a gun to protect or kill himself until it's suggested by another soldier. The portrayal of Donlin is very close to evil, as played by Bridges. He has absolutely zero compassion.
He pushes the troops past the breaking point, and for all their trouble several of the men are killed, one in an Indian torture that looks straight out of David Lynch. Think of the Man in the Yellow Suit in "Blue Velvet", who died standing up, only this is a lot more horrific. From a distance, he looks like a scarecrow. The troop (what's left of them) finally reaches the Little Big Horn river, but of course we all know the history, and Custer got his ass kicked anyway. I won't get into the politics. In school, of course, we were taught that Custer was an evil bastard who got what his arrogant ass deserved. The truth may lie somewhere in between, as it often does, because the Sioux were not exactly nice people, either. Here's a comparison: where I live, the Native American predecessors were Tataviam and Chumash. Have you ever heard one bad thing about either of those two tribes? No you haven't. They were peaceful hunter-gatherers who lived here for 8000 years. So, like every civilization, there were peaceful Indians and warlike ones, and we've already talked about how the warlike picked on the peaceful, before the white man even got here. So while Custer may have been ruthless, the truth is always somewhere in between, because the Sioux were every bit as violent, killing wagon train civilians.
I have to bring up my great grandmother again, and I'm gonna start using her as a measuring stick, because she was a seventeen year old girl when the Little Big Horn massacre happened. In high school history class, the story of Custer's Last Stand seems like a million years ago, but it can't be, because my great grandma was in high school when it happened!
At any rate, Two Huge Thumbs Up for "Little Big Horn", which has a 6.7 rating on IMDB (very high). Lippert delivers again, and the picture is razor sharp. ////
The previous night, we had an excellent pre-Coder, almost like a Greek tragedy, from the first year of sound pictures. "The Racketeer"(1929) stars Robert Armstrong as "Mahlon Keane", a hood with a heart of gold. It must be the Irish in him. In the opening scene, some kids are mocking a down-on-his-luck street violinist. The guy is drunk (wasted is more accurate) and can barely carry a tune. Keane happens to be walking by, just as a cop is rousting the musician. "C'mon, pal. tell me your name. Where do you live? Let's get you home."
"Hello there, Officer Murphy," says Keane, smiling. "Why, I know this gent." He slips a 50 spot in the violinist's pocket. "He can't be a vagrant if he's got 50 bucks on him, right? In fact, I happen to know he lives at the Ritz. Or is it the YMCA? Better make it the Y, Murphy, at least for today. I wouldn't want his friends at the Ritz to see him in this condition." Keane doesn't know the violinist, of course, has no idea who he is. He just likes being gallant and flashing his money around. And it's not entirely for show. He's one of those rare gangsters who really does like helping people. He just happens to have a talent for making money the crooked way (how he does it is never shown), and he likes to spread the wealth in certain cases.
After he departs, a taxi pulls up and a well-dressed blonde gets out, shocked. "Oh, Tony!" She knows the violinist, whose full name is "Tony Vaughan" (Roland Drew). He's now passed out on the sidewalk. The cop gave up and left him lying there.
After some scenes where we see Keane instructing his henchmen to deal with a rival gangster, we cut to a casino, where he's now playing high stakes poker. In walks the blonde, "Rhoda Philbrooke" (Carol Lombard) and the gossip begins. The gist of it is this: she was once married to a millionaire who divorced her because she ran off with a nudist! Super pre-Code alert! She was left penniless (her husband made sure she got nothing), and the message is that she did it all for love. In fact, the gossiping women admire her. She sits down at the poker table, next to Mahlon Keane, and because she's broke she proceeds to cheat. She's good at it, and is raking in the chips, when another woman notices something amiss: "I played an ace of clubs. Now there's an ace of spades in the discard. What's going on here?" Keane, already having seen his own fifty dollar bill (the one he slipped to the violinist) being put by Rhoda Philbrooke into the kitty, realizes now she's a grifter, but he feels sorry for her, so he covers her cheating. The game then ends, and Keane follows Rhoda out the door, fascinated.
He's attracted to her, but at her hotel, he sees she's with Tony the violinist, whom she's trying to get sober. He struggles from his bed for a drink. "Please Rhoda, just one glass of gin!" She says no. "I love you, and I'm going to make you well." He even tries to call a hooch merchant who sells gin passing as soda pop. Keane is present for all of this. He sees that Rhoda loves Tony Vaughan, and accepts it. Now, he just wants to help, because he loves her, so he offers to sponsor Tony, no strings attached. Together, Keane and Rhoda rehab Tony until he's ready to resume his career. His first concert is scheduled for a Paris cruise ship. By now, he's back to the shredding form that made him famous. Rhoda feels left out. "He doesn't need me anymore." So she goes back to Keane, who does need her, because he's now trying to clean up his own life. "No more illegal rackets," tells her. "From now on, I am living for you." Their wedding is scheduled for the night of Tony's concert on the cruise ship. He's accepted, sort of, that he's lost Rhoda to his reinstated career, but at the last minute, pre-concert, he says, "please don't leave me!" That's all she needed to hear, because she wanted him to need her. Now, she calls off the wedding to Keane at the very last minute.
In a perfectly paced subplot, all throughout the movie, the policeman Murphy, who likes Keane but knows he's a gangster, has been leaning on Keane's chauffeur, a guy named "Squid" (Al Hill), telling him, while he's parked in Keane's fancy car: "Y'know Squid, I'm trying for a promotion, and we've got a lot of unsolved murders on my beat. Like that one....who was that fella who got his neck sliced open by a bottle? Y'know, Squid, I was the one who found that broken bottle neck, and it has fingerprints. But you know something, Squid? That victim was a hoodlum himself. I could forget about him, if you were to help me solve murders down the road. Of course, if you don't want to, there's a chair up at Sing Sing that hasn't been used in a while. I imagine they're getting itchy to turn it on, if you get my drift."
Murphy keeps leaning on Squid, until he finally breaks. Now Mahlon Keane's in the hot seat. His good-guy side wins out aboard the cruise ship, as he sacrifices himself for Tony Vaughan. The sound is very good here, considering it's 1929, but there's that "paused" dialogue thing again, with long gaps this time, and we now have a clue why that is: A reviewer on IMDB says that the "dead-air" pauses are due to "the limitations of the (early sound era) microphones". I knew it was a technical issue. Carole Lombard is so great in this movie, pure class as always. She and Clark Gable lived in Encino for a while, and raced their horses at Devonshire Downs. Two Big Thumbs Up for "The Racketeer". The picture is somewhat aged, but watchable. ////
And that's all I know. Did you see the rocket trail in the sky last night? It was launched from Vandenberg at around 7:30. I must've missed the launch, and the soaring rocket, by about ten minutes, but when I went on my CSUN walk, the trail's corkscrew was still fresh in the sky. Turns out it was a test of a "national security satellite" by the U.S. Space Force. No other details were forthcoming.
In other news, absolutely tragic, I just learned on Facebook, just an hour ago, that Cupid's is going out of business. The post said it will "close in a couple months." That's such awful news that I can't even process it yet. When I do, I will try to comment.
My blogging music was "Space Shanty" by Khan, my late night was Handel's Scipione Opera. I wish you a nice weekend, and I send you Tons of Love, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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