Frontier Uprising

California Indians dressed like Plains tribes. Whites playing Indian and playing Mexicans. An imaginary alliance between a Mexican general and Shoshones, who actually live over 500 miles away from California.

Lame attempts at humor. Slow pacing, little action.

Nothing to recommend.

I am watching Frontier Uprising now on The Westerns Channel. It's a complete remake of the 1940 Kit Carson, starring Jon Hall. Footage from the earlier film is included in this programmer. Jim Davis stars as scout and trapper Jim Stockton, guiding a wagon train of settlers and soldiers to California. Nancy Hadley plays love interest Consuela, a Spanish California girl who only seems to know one Spanish word, "Aqui." Bit and character actor Ken Mayer is Stockton's sidekick, Beaver. Watching Frontier Uprising is a good way to spend a rainy Saturday morning, but it will be forgotten soon afterward.

This western about a wagon train on its way across the US to California in the 1840s and its travails with attacking Indians and Mexican forces managed to attract a few familiar western faces, such as Jim Davis, Nestor Paiva, Stuart Randall and Addison Richards. Otherwise, it's a boring, mostly studio-bound effort saddled with a script of the consistency of molasses, leaden direction by veteran (which does not, in this case, mean competent) director Edward L. Cahn, very poor performances by a supporting cast of unknowns that explains why they remained unknowns, a preponderance of stock footage, some confused "action" scenes and muddy photography. Davis, as the scout leading the wagon train, tries hard, but his romance with Spanish "senorita" Nancy Hadley goes nowhere, mainly because of the idiotic drivel they're forced to recite and Hadley's shortcomings as an actress (she only made one more film after this, though she did do some TV work). Paiva, Randall and Richards try to inject some life--and professionalism--into the goings-on, but there's only so much they could do, and it wasn't enough. The film's cheapness shows through in every frame, and that's hardly the only area in which it's deficient. A very poor effort not worth wasting your time on.

Wagon train guide Jim Davis arrives with the party in California to discover that the United States and Mexico are at war. This does not please high-born senorita Nancy Hadley, with whom he has been wrangling for the last thousand miles or so.

Davis seems earnest in his role, as if he hopes this will lead to better things. He had been appearing in westerns at Republic since 1942, and bit roles at Metro without getting much traction. Unfortunately director Edward Cahn was better noted for his efficiency than his star-making abilities, and the B western was a dying genre. So the battle sequences are taken from a movie shot ten years earlier, and everyone went back to earning a living and no accolades.

If this film does look familiar to you it's because the subject was done for a big budget independent film from United Artists twenty years earlier. Jim Davis's Jim Stockton is standing in for Jon Hall's Kit Carson from the original film. Kit Carson doesn't hold up very well today and this one even less so. Watching Frontier Uprising I was certain I had seen some of the footage before.

Things are reaching a boil between Mexico and the USA when Shoshone Indians attack Jim Davis and a group of Mountain Men making their way to Fort Bridger to sell their pelts. They've got rifles this time because the Mexicans have given them some. As we know giving rifles or selling rifles to Indians is a frontier no-no. But the Mexicans want to keep those Yankee settlers out of their sparsely held northern area and the much richer sea coast of California.

That's where Davis and two of his Mountain Men sidekicks, Ken Renard and David Mayer come in. They sign on as guides for a wagon train going west and some army troopers come along as well led by Lieutenant Don Kelly. Kelly and Davis start panting hot and heavy for Senorita Nancy Hadley going west to be reunited with her father Nestor Paiva.

I didn't that highly of Kit Carson and I think less highly of Frontier Uprising. Action fans will like it though.