Oh! Susanna

"Oh! Susannah" is really a knockoff of several John Ford films. After the success of "My Darling Clementine" and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" Republic must have thought the public would accept any sort of rehash as long as the main theme and the title were a folksy ditty. Here we have John Wayne (Rod Cameron), Henry Fonda (Forrest Tucker), Ward Bond (Chill Wills), Grant Withers (Jim Davis), Victor McLaglen (William Haade), Maureen O'Hara (Adrian Booth), and even John Agar (James Lydon) wannabes. The climax is right out of "Fort Apache."

The action is often chaotic and diffuse, with Rod Cameron holding the film together through his understated acting style. "Oh! Susannah" shows glimpses of what Cameron might have done with a better story and production.

Rod Cameron stars as Captain Calhoun, a cavalry officer dedicated to protecting the rights of Indians from greedy gold prospectors. Calhoun's superior officer Lt. Col. Ungar (Forrest Tucker) despises all Indians, and makes things difficult for those who try to enforce existing treaties. Other interested parties include saloon owner Ira Jordan (Jim Davis), who is counting upon plenty of revenue from the prospectors, and saloon thrush Lia Wilson (Adrian Booth), who carries torches for Calhoun, Ungar and Jordan. An anticipated climax comes with a vengeance as the betrayed Indians attack Ungar's fort.

Oh! Susanna is a fairly ambitious western with lavish production values and good acting, especially by Forest Tucker who as a head of a Fort has a giant-sized chip on his shoulder and is egging for a fight with the Sioux. Jim Davis joins him as a negative character, also egging for a war - they both clash with Rod Cameron's captain character, a West Point man, who is trying to quell a war with Sioux, over a treaty and a woman ( Lorna Grey). It's a fairly good western with enough conflict, dialogue and action - the latter comes in the last twenty minutes with a rousing injun attack.

Overall, Oh! Susanna is entertaining, though the title is wrong as there's no link to Susanna, except that the song appears briefly in "The End". Not sure why it was called that - maybe the filmmakers wanted something unexpected and original.

This has got nothing to do with anyone called Susanna. There is no Susanna in the film. Dumb title.

The US cavalry patrol the mountains to prevent gold prospectors from exploring and getting into trouble with Sioux Indians. As a consequence, they don't see eye to eye with local cowboys who are also interested in gold prospecting.

The story is pretty aimless and doesn't really go anywhere until we have the final battle with the Indians and this end sequence almost rescues the film. It just doesn't quite do it thanks to the bland characters that we have spent our time with up to that point.

The sound quality isn't very good but the film does score points for the outdoor settings and cavalry v Indian sequences. We get all the clichés - bar-room brawl, etc and the leading lady sings a song which is terrible. Cowboys want to hear an uptempo number and so do we as an audience. All Western saloon songs should be quick-paced with a catchy tune and colourful, cool outfits for the girls to dance along in. Not the nonsense served up in this film.

Overall, it's a "not quite good enough" for this effort.

At first I didn't think much, but as the plot became interesting I decided to stick with it. While I'm far from an expert on the Old West, the commands issued to the troopers seem real. What was more impressive was the detail of the soldiers loading and firing their single shot carbines. That was a nice touch. However, the use of colt pistols seemed wrong - I believe they would have Navy revolvers in the cavalry. I've read that soldiers were on the low end of the social hierarchy in the West and this was represented in the townspeople's attitudes, although in this case they had a specific reason. As far as the acting, I guess I have a soft spot for Forrest Tucker (maybe from watching F-Troop as a kid, as horrible as it was in retrospect.) Chill Wills was a hoot! I liked the way he yelled the commands - took you by surprise. So, all in all not a great film, by any stretch of the imagination, it was worth watching. And seeing the track record of the writer that's not surprising.

As Herbert J. Yates of Republic Pictures was losing his stable of cowboy stars to television one way or another, he started doing serious westerns such as this one. Oh! Susanna in which the song is heard over the title credits and not again is a good cavalry western that borrows a great deal from the John Ford classic Fort Apache. They even use the same song about 40 miles a day on beans and hay. And John Ford regular Jack Pennick an old horse cavalryman was technical adviser.

The director was Joseph Kane who cut his teeth on Gene Autry and Roy Rogers features was now branching into more serious work. Like Fort Apache the conflict is between two officers, new commander Lieutenant Colonel Forrest Tucker and Rod Cameron the captain who was in charge of the fort before. Tucker rose through the ranks and he truly hates West Point types like Cameron. Especially those like Cameron who take their orders seriously about keeping settlers out of the Sioux's sacred Black Hills territory. Cameron and Tucker are also rivals for Lorna Gray who works in Jim Davis's saloon and Davis has an interest in her as well. Tucker has no compunction about pulling rank.

In Fort Apache there was a certain poetic nobility invested in both the main characters of John Wayne and Henry Fonda. But John Ford was a poet on the screen. Nothing terribly noble about Tucker in fact he's downright stupid. There's quite a bit of similarity with another Henry Fonda film Mister Roberts with Fonda's rivalry with his captain James Cagney.

A lot of the enlisted men could have easily been drawn from any of John Ford's cavalry film. Chill Wills plays the sergeant assigned to Cameron's platoon who narrates at the beginning and the end and it is his eyes through which the film is seen. This is one of Chill Wills's best screen roles.

If you didn't see the similarities between Fort Apache and Oh! Susanna before the ending is taken right from that film. Fort Apache is one of my favorite westerns and while Oh! Susanna is not in the same league, it's still a pretty good western