The Charge at Feather River

No brass button soldiers here.

The Charge at Feather River is directed by Gordon Douglas and written by James R. Webb. It stars Guy Madison, Frank Lovejoy, Helen Westcott, Vera Miles, Dick Wesson, Onslow Stevens, Steve Brodie, Neville Brand and James Brown. Filmed in Natural Vision-3-Dimension and WarnerColor, music is by Max Steiner and cinematography by J. Peverell Marley.

The Guardhouse Brigade.

Wonderful. It’s the sort of Western you watched as a kid and it made you fall in love with the genre. It has it all, the standard Cowboys versus Indians action to keep the youngsters amused, and quality characterisations for the knowing adults to acknowledge. Plot would become very familiar over the years, where a bunch of reprobates, here they are the bad boys of the army guardhouse, are trained up and sent on a suicide mission. The mission here is to rescue two white sisters who were captured by the Cheyenne years ago.

The group dynamic positively bubbles with tension as men who fought on opposite sides of the Civil War are tasked with performing as one force. There’s also a heated rivalry between two men because of a woman, and naturally there’s some looses cannons in the group. Things further pick up when the two ladies are rescued and the group has to try and make it back to the fort with the whole Cheyenne tribe on their tail. The elder sister is grateful to be rescued, the younger one not so much since she has converted to the Cheyenne way and is set to marry Chief Thunder Hawk.

Thus the group dynamic goes up a couple of more notches on the stove as the younger sister does all she can to sabotage the mission, while the elder frets about how society will treat her once her past comes to light, and of course there’s an attraction between her and the alpha male. Yet the romantic thread is superbly written, really mature and never cloying. There’s some requisite humour that works very well, the action is very well staged by the wily Douglas and Madi...