Red Tomahawk

A. C. Lyles made a number of low budget westerns @ Paramount with former stars like Dan Duryea, Rory Calhoun, Linda Darnell and Richard Arlen. Most are films you can sit through watch and they are neither good or bad. Red Tomahawk is an exception. It is bad. Where to start? The music. I do not expect Elmer Bernstein but give me a break. Bad music throughout the movie makes the film worse then it could have been. Then there are the ridiculous scenes such as Broderick Crawford in a buckboard outrunning Indians on horseback, and scenes with Star Howard Keel fighting Indians that anyone can see were faked. Did I forget not enough of love interest Joan Caufield? The best thing I can say is Keel and co-star Scott Brady do decent acting jobs. For them I give the film 2/10 stars.

A C Lyles was a producer of budget westerns and Red Tomahawk was one of three starring singing baritone Howard Keel in a straight role. Keel was actually a fairly good dramatic actor and ended his career strepping in to Dallas after Jim Davis died. Here he plays a Union army captain who discovers the massacre of Custer after the battle of the Little Big Horn. He manages to acquire two gatling guns, early examples of machine guns, which then help to beat off Sitting Bull's army of Sioux warriors that would otherwise have overwhelmed the smaller contingent of soldiers. Joan Coulfield is slotted into this otherwise all male action drama as a love interest for Keel. Two other former leading men, Broderick Crawford and Scott Brady assist Keel on his journey to defend Deadwood against Sioux attacks. Wendell Corey looking the worse for wear, which I believe was brought about by heavy drinking, is a town villain. These former stars in their own right had all reached the end of their former glory on the screen and I guess were taking whatever work was offered. It would have been a better picture I think if it had not constantly chopped between location shots and studio shots which I found jarring. I don't think the Sioux would have all been in buckskin uniforms either. People get shot all the time but no blood shows. If a movie is shot on the cheap then it shows and these A C Lyles' pictures are notorious for that. The movie is mildly entertaining but that's all. It does benefit however by the casting of likeable actors.

You know AC Lyles, the specialist in recycling old movie stars, not the biggest as he Duke or Dick Widmark, but stars enough anyway. Those films were all westerns, all made in the late sixties, but not on the Sam Peckinpah's nor Monty Hellman's way, no specially gloomy films, but on the old fashioned way - with old actors, as we had in the fifties, with the hero, the villain and so on. The usual stuff. Nothing terrific. Only THE BOUNTY KILLER, starring Dan Duryea, during that same period, was worth watching, but though it seemed AC LYles productions, it was not. So, back to this one, that may be the thousandth western taking place just after Little Big Horn massacre, some kind of Nam disaster and national scar before its time, a nightmare, a tragedy, which the American film industry must, ot at least try to exorcise, this at any cost. This story was already used, over used, far too much to prevent the audiences to feel asleep. Gun smugglers and machine gun traffic, with Indians in the middle. Nothing special.

Army Captain Tom York is sent to contact General Custer at Little Big Horn, however by the time he arrives, all he finds is the massacred 7th Cavalry and the Sioux walking around. Tom York rides into the town of Deadwood in order to find a telegraph that he can use to warn the other regiments heading towards Custer's former location. The locals mistake York for a deserter until his friend Ep Wyatt vouches for him.

Somewhere in the area is hidden a pair of Gatling guns, which would be vital to fending off such an assault. The only person who knows the hiding place is Dakota Lil, a saloonkeeper who already has lost her husband and son in battle and wants no more part of it.

Ultimately persuaded by York to reveal where the guns are, they are betrayed by a gambler, Elkins, who intends to sell them to the enemy for a profit.

Red Tomahawk is not a bad A. C Lyle western as it has a simple plot, dialogue and action, which keeps you watching. It's not world shatteringly great, but it's a fair western. You got the usual old stars and some tongue in cheek moments.

Oscar-winner Broderick Crawford is amongst the cast here in this B-Western from Paramount. Howard Keel is Captain York, a government agent in 1876 South Dakota. He is the first to come across the massacre of General Custer and his men at Little Big Horn, and he makes his way to the local town of Deadwood to warn the locals about the impending Sioux attack. The locals are typically backward and hostile and ignore his requests to hand over the town's two Gatling guns so that he may take them to a the nearest army base for the soldiers to use against the Indians. Instead they set to barricade the town and point a gun at either end of it, which of course will be a futile manoeuvre. With a few allies, York sets out to take them by force...

There is nothing exceptional here, but "Red Tomahawk" (named after the Indian who killed Sitting Bull) is an entertaining production and it was not meant to be anything more than that. The performances are good, Keel, Crawford and Caulfield lead the way, and there is a decent amount of action.