Fighting Caravans

..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.

Stars a young gary cooper, guiding wagons across the plains of the west. A remake of the 1923 film covered wagon (with the one and only alan hale !). And the story will be told again in the 1934 wagon wheels, with randolph scott!. Keep an eye out for gene pallette. He was a supporting actor in so many films of the 1930s. But was not a nice guy, if you read his bio in wikipedia. Caravans is okay; the typical zane grey western story. More fanfare and galloping horses than anything. It's a story about a wagon train traversing america, but many of the scenes all seem to take place on the same (backlot) of the studio. In one scene about 45 minutes in, the wheel on the wagon isn't even turning as the wagon moves...say what? The picture quality and sound are both so-so, but this film is coming up on 100 years old! Director otto brower made a ton of zane grey's stories into film. Sadly, brower died young at 50.

Quick and amusing dialogue, fun characters, great location shooting, and high production values for the time, I was very happy to stumble upon this wonderful old film. I found it thoroughly entertaining.

Seeing the charismatic glow of a skinny young Gary Cooper makes me regret that he adopted such a dull and wooden persona later in his career.

A lot of the negative critiques of this film here seem to be based on superficial criticisms of the look and pacing of movies of this era, and not with the movie itself. If a movie is engaging, one soon gets used to the shortcomings of the time when early talkies were still finding their way with dialogue delivery and pacing. In fact, I thought they did a pretty good job here. While it is somewhat episodic, the performances are sensitive, and it does give us a rich and convincing glimpse of the wagon train era, even with the white man's simplistic perspective of Native American culture.

"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.

let's weigh the merits of this film: (1) a strikingly handsome (and tall), youthful Gary Cooper -- this is the opportunity to see a giant screen legend when he was a vibrant young newcomer! This alone merits seeing this movie. (2) The dialogue is witty, pithy and fun -- in fact, give me the screenwriter from 1931 over most of today's movies!. (3) There is a lot of fast-paced and exciting western action (and the stuntwork is just plain fun to watch). Yes, this was relatively early movie making, and in some ways it shows, but that also provides tremendous enjoyment for the film buff. Watch it with a light heart, but with reverence for the old films, and I think you can't help but enjoy it.