Fighting Caravans

"The old time west is passing," says one of the characters in "Fighting Caravans." This early 'talkie' is also one of the earliest 'big budget' westerns from what I read. Unfortunately, this is a B Movie all the way, and not that entertaining either. A young Gary Cooper plays a scout of some sort who is working for a wagon train caravan carrying freight from Missouri to Sacramento, California in the 1860's during the civil war and right before the railroads had been built throughout the west. There is hardship, danger, Indians, romance and cornball humor in this vintage western. Somehow, when you mix them all up together, the recipe isn't all that tasty. The humor is obnoxious at times and the acting, even Gary Cooper's, is noticeably weak during some scenes. This movie tries to be several different types of movies all rolled in to one and it doesn't pull it off. Interestingly enough, there are moments in the film where it is evident that the style of acting and camera work from silent films is still being used. It is a bit fascinating to see how an early 1930's filmmaker portrayed the 1860's. I'd say pass on this movie unless you are a Gary Cooper fan or a hard core fan of early westerns. 61/100.

..and directors Otto Brower and David Burton, very loosely based on a Zane Grey novel. Gary Cooper stars as scout Clint Belmet, a hard-drinking troublemaker who nonetheless gets hired to escort a large wagon train west to California. Along with his crusty pals Bill (Ernest Torrence) and Jim (Tully Marshall), he finds the safest path through the hills, and away from "wild Injuns". He also makes time with solo pioneer woman Felice (Lili Damita).

Paramount hoped to make this a real epic, but it gets bogged down in cliches, pointless character digressions, and some miscasting. Damita has trouble with her English, while Cooper looks too clean and neat to be hanging around with the sloppy likes of Torrence and Marshall: where does he keep getting his clothes laundered, and why aren't his pals using the same service? There's a big barroom brawl scene played for laughs, and the inevitable Indian attack, but the outcome of this is obvious from the opening credits. Speaking of which, one of the few stylistic touches I liked was having Native Americans in costume walking toward the camera during the credits, obscuring words and even blacking out the screen.

In the early days of sound Paramount purchased a number of Zene Grey stories to be filmed, mostly as B picture attractions and done by their rising new B picture cowboy, Randolph Scott. Fighting Caravans however got the A picture treatment and starred Gary Cooper.

Cooper plays a young hell raising scout who's been taught the ways of the woods by two grizzled old timers, Ernest Torrence and Tully Marshall. All three of them sign on to guide a wagon train in the 1860s west. Adding to the attraction for Cooper is pretty young Lily Damita who earlier on pretended to be his wife to get him out of trouble with a sheriff.

A lot of the same ground was covered by Twentieth Century Fox the year before with The Big Trail and its new star John Wayne. The Big Trail however failed to find its audience, but Fighting Caravans with proved box office star Cooper showed a respectable profit for Paramount-Publix as the white mountain studio was called at that time. Of course both films owe plenty to James Cruze's silent classic, The Covered Wagon.

Like in The Big Trail the villain here is a renegade white man, stirring up the Indians. The very rousing attack on the wagon train during the climax had elements of it borrowed over 20 years later in the James Stewart western, Bend of the River.

A whole lot of Gary Cooper's early sound films for some reason are never shown. Possible that prints no longer exist. Though Fighting Caravans is not a great film, it's an entertaining one. In fact a few years later it was remade by Randolph Scott in Wagon Wheels where that film used all kinds of stock footage from this one.

"Fighting Caravans", while an "A" picture in presentation, is a "B" picture in spirit. Even allowing for the fact that talkies had only been around for a few years when this film came out in 1931, it's still very much rooted in silent-era melodrama, even though some comedy scenes between veterans Ernest Torrance and Tully Marshall are injected in an attempt to lighten things up. Gary Cooper is effective, if still a bit hesitant in delivering his lines, and his love interest Lili Damita is pretty and sexy but wildly miscast and not up to the job. The film had two directors, and it's painfully obvious which one did what--David Burton, a Russian émigré brought out from the Broadway stage, directed the non-action scenes and his background shows in the unimaginative staging (this was only his third film as a director) and overexaggerated acting. Co-director Otto Brower was an action specialist and second-unit director, and while he did some excellent work later in his career (he worked on 1946's "Duel in the Sun", 1944's "Buffalo Bill" and 1939's "Jesse James", among dozens of others), the climactic Indian attack in this film is actually pretty ineptly staged; although there are a lot of Indians riding around, whooping and getting shot off their horses, it's not particularly exciting or even involving and, in addition, is very poorly edited.

If Paramount meant this picture to be its answer to "The Big Trail", "The Iron Horse" or "The Covered Wagon", it fails badly. It has its moments (there's a good bar brawl about halfway through the picture) and Torrance and Marshall work well together, but all in all, it's just a "B" picture in everything but budget, and not as good as many others that cost far less. Worth a watch once, maybe, but not more than that.

This film, Originally titled BLAZING ARROWS, is the first of several based upon a Zane Grey novel published only two years prior, and the version that is most faithful to the book, while being one of the largest budgeted Westerns of the early sound era, with the viewer advised to remember that the period of the narrative (1862) antedated its audience only to the extent that the Great Depression does to spectators today. The story tells of a caravan of freight wagons journeying from Independence, Missouri, to the West Coast during a pre-railroad time, with settlers accompanying, and the procession's four month struggle with hostile Indians, very harsh winter weather, forbidding terrain and renegade betrayal, and is particularly full of interesting detail as to the methods of the freightmen and their metier. Gary Cooper portrays Clint Belmet, a Missouri guide who has been reared and trained as a member of a successive generation of scouts and trappers by two veterans of the breed, Bill Jackson (Ernest Torrence) and Jim Bridger (Tully Marshall), who are unaware that their way of life is to be ended by an advancing intracontinental rail system, only temporarily slowed by the War Between the States. Because of plot circumstances, Belmet must pretend to be married to a lone traveller, Felice (Lily Damita), and their seesaw relationship provides one of the main themes of a wideranging scenario, with Belmet and his mentors trumpeting of the glories of their fading way of life while Felice seeks to inculcate within her swain a sense of domestic virtue. The cinematography of Lee Garmes is very effective with its images of the travails of the wagon train and his work is not compromised by the editing which is crisp and appropriate for a film as episodic as is this one. The work's most serious failing is a lack of a consistent point of view, as it is essentially a comedy, due largely to a highly effectual performance from Torrence, here permitted to utilize his native Scottish burr to its fullest, and is somewhat reduced in impact during scenes of action and romance as a result of only cursory emphasis upon each.