Category: Review

Ravage

  By

★★½
“Harper’s bizarre.”

Wildlife photographer Harper Sykes (Dexter-Jones) is out in the wilderness of the “Watchatoomy Valley” [fictitious, but apparently located somewhere in the Virginias], when she stumbles across a group of men brutally attacking a victim. She snaps a few pics before fleeing the scene, but her attempts to report the incident to the authorities backfire immediately, and she quickly finds herself at the mercy of their leader, the appropriately-named Ravener (Longstreet). He explains the victim was a scout for big business, whose predations would destroy the natural environment, and so had to be stopped. Now, Harper is next in line. However, she is not the innocent and helpless victim they think. Even when she has the chance to escape, Harper decides to stay in the valley, and take vengeance on Ravener and the rest of his clan.

It is an interesting idea. Frequently in the horror genre, the character arc is of the “final girl”, who only resorts to violence when finally pushed too far. That certainly isn’t the case here: indeed, Harper actually fires first, gunning down one of Ravener’s henchmen as soon as she steps from her truck. Yet there’s a reason the trope of the final girl exists, because it pulls the audience along with her. Here, Harper’s actions are unexpected enough they could well disengage much of the audience, coming as they do before we’ve established much sympathy for her. Another problem is her decision to stay and actively look for her revenge isn’t well-enough defined: I was left wondering for quite some time, why she didn’t leave. Some explanation of why she’s so skilled might have been nice: not much, just a quick reference to time in the military, or a survivalist Dad, would have been fine.

The structure is also a tad problematic, with the film being told in flashback, a heavily-bandaged Harper recounting her story to a disbelieving state trooper from her hospital bed. So, we know she will survive, and the early explanations also remove much other tension from subsequent proceedings. If you’ve seen more than, roughly, two of this kind of movie, you’ll also fail to be surprised that the kindly individual to whom the heroine turns for help, ends up being anything but. I could perhaps have done without the lengthy digression into medieval torture techniques and bovine anatomy. Though both do prove at least tangentially necessary to the plot, and the latter in particular, leads to a grisly payoff.

Dexter-Jones does a good job of selling her role, and Harper generally has no compunction about acting, e.g. blowing one of her target’s brains out at point-blank range. Yet, this is at odds with some of her other actions. She literally throws up after watching the initial savagery, and the sight of a dead body later makes her shriek like a little girl. It’s all maddeningly inconsistent, and left me rather annoyed, with too much the potential here wasted through sloppy execution.

Dir: Teddy Grennan
Star: Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Robert Longstreet, Michael Weaver, Bruce Dern
a.k.a. Swing Low

Kat, by K.L. McRae

  By

Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

Firstly, I’m still trying to figure out the relevance of the cover (right). With a heroine named Kat, why is there a dog pictured? It’s not as if she even owns one at any point. The “size of the fight” line… well, tenuous at best. I should probably have listened to my instincts and skipped this frankly implausible tale, about a teenage girl who is smart, attractive and a black-belt martial artist with 34E breasts. Yet she ends up having to get work as a stripper, a job at which she is naturally brilliant (thanks to adopting a pseudo-Xena persona), in order to keep her alcoholic mother out of debt. She breaks the arm of a particularly unpleasant customer, Alex, an act which gets her the attention of Alex’s business partner. He runs McKenzie Personal Security, and offers Kat a job as a trainee bodyguard.

She and the boss, a black Scotsman who is terminally ill, end up falling in love, while Alex, who had been set to inherit the business until Kat showed up, plots against her with his cronies. This ends in a nightmare gang-rape, setting up Kat to take vengeance. Oh, and the all-powerful MPS has a “black” division, which kills pedophiles and the like for money. If you are not going, “Wait, what?” at multiple points during the above synopsis, you’re a more tolerant reader than I. So much of this sounded like dubious sexual fantasy, I was genuinely surprised to discover the author is a woman. I mean, it could still be dubious sexual fantasy; I just tend to expect that kind of thing more from male writers.

The structure is all over the place. After she is attacked, Kat’s actions seem completely bizarre and pointless, and the book fast-forwards through a couple of years, until a later explanation that falls some way short of convincing. Meanwhile, neither Alex nor his allies come over as any kind of credible threat: in particular, their assault on her rural farmhouse is portrayed as painfully inept. Which, I concede, may be part of the point. As the book says, “vile bullies…might have some skills but put them up against someone who really knows their stuff and the only chance they had was blind luck.” During this, Kat sits back in her stronghold and lets her allies take care of the threat, bringing the villains to her like a Christmas present for her amusement. She certainly spends more time training in martial arts, than actually putting her skills into practice. In fact, she probably spends more time attending karaoke nights than being an action heroine. I was somewhat surprised Kat did not turn out to be a classically-trained opera singer, while she was at it.

All told, sadly, this book turned out to be a bit of a dog. I guess the cover was representative enough, after all.

Author: K.L. McRae
Publisher: Little Silver Publishing Ltd, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 2 in the Kat series.

Grand Theft Auto Girls

  By

★★
“Preferred this when it was called Counterfeiting in Suburbia.”

Turns out that The Asylum are not the only company who makes mockbusters. As its alternate name makes clear, this Lifetime TVM is clearly a knock-off of the title mentioned above, down to the same, basic plot. Two teenage girls begin doing crime, largely for the excitement. A teacher becomes aware of their exploits and decides to blackmail them for his own benefit, by making them escalate their activities. This brings them increasingly under the scrutiny of both authorities and criminal elements, not to mention parental disapproval, eventually leading to a climax where all these aspects cross paths. As my review of Counterfeiting mentioned, it wasn’t even a particularly original idea there. As you can imagine, a second-generation copy is not an improvement, even if the idea of a knock-off of a movie about forgery possesses a certain irony. 

The main twist here is that instead of counterfeiting, the crime in question is car theft. Emily (Belkin) is being brought up by her mother, after her father died in a car accident, and is working to restore her late dad’s muscle car, a task which has helped give her certain car skills, including hot-wiring them. She has teamed up with classmate Max (Helt), to boost cars, purely for joy-riding purposes, but the pair decided to make a commercial endeavour out of it, and sell the vehicles to a local chop-shop they know. Their shop teacher, Mr. Curnow (Hynes) finds out about their work, and decides to use them to start stealing high-end cars, to provide seed money for his own business involving exotic sports vehicles. This doesn’t sit well with the chop-shop owner, the cops are beginning to close in, and worst of all, Emily’s Mom is growing increasingly suspicious. When she pays Curnow a visit at his home, she is held hostage to ensure Emily completes one final task, stealing a Hummer belonging to a well-connected local club owner.

This is so painfully bland, it should have been called Barbie and Friends Do Crimes. Admittedly, I was hoping for something like a female version of a Fast and the Furious movies. As I soon as I realized this was a Lifetime TVM, all hopes of that evaporated, but it could still have avoided having less edge than a rusty butter-knife. It shoehorns in a hot teenage boy delinquent (Manley) on whom Emily can crush, largely as a means of filling time, since he serves no real plot purpose. Even the car-stealing scenes, which could have generated tension, are feeble: witness in particular the example which consists largely of one girl starting intently into her handbag, waiting for a light to go green. Hitchcock is turning in his grave. It did manage to leave me yearning nostalgically for a film which only got 2½ stars, so that’s a new experience.

While I have already written more about this than it deserves, I just discovered there is still another TVM going down the same furrow: Smuggling in Suburbia. I’ll just leave its synopsis here. mostly as a warning that the possibilities appear, sadly, endless: “Joanie gets recruited to travel with other girls to exciting cities delivering camera lenses to photographers–and falls in love with Tucker, a partner in the courier business. When she searches the camera case she’s carrying and finds diamonds hidden inside a lens, Joanie realizes she is part of an illegal smuggling ring! She just needs to pay for her brother’s cancer surgery that would otherwise bankrupt the family.” Yeah, I’m good, thanks.

Dir: Jason Bourque
Star: Zoë Belkin, Samantha Helt, Tyler Hynes, Jake Manley
a.k.a. Hotwired in Suburbia

Riddle Story of Devil

  By

★★★
“This class is a killer…”

Another example which illustrates the difference between Western and Japanese approaches to education. For here we have “Class Black”, a group containing a baker’s dozen of female pupils, eleven of whom have been tasked by a mysterious group to assassinate the twelfth, with the person who does it being given absolutely anything they want by the organizers. Yeah, it’s not quite Beverley Hills 90210, is it? Of course, nor is it quite that simple. One of the candidates, Tokaku Azuma (Suwa), is the daughter of a legendary and long-standing family of assassins, but has had enough of her enforced role. Inspired by her mother, she has decided to rebel, and so switches sides. Instead of targeting the intended victim, Haru Ichinose (Kanemoto), she vows to protect her from the other students.

Of course, it is a ridiculously contrived scenario, even given the rules which are laid down at an early “orientation”. The series (twelve x 25-minute eps, plus a bonus one) seems occasionally to be aware of this. It shows up in elements such as the class’s teacher (Sakurai), who is depicted as barely noticing three-quarters of his class has “transferred out” in about a week. But these are strictly assassins who act as necessary to the plot. For example, one attempt consists of strapping a bomb around Haru’s neck… but then giving Tokaku 24 hours to find the four-digit code necessary to disarm it. If I had the promise of whatever I wished, I’d not be as generous. I’m just sayin’…

Admittedly, when the truth is finally revealed over the final couple of episodes, it turns out things aren’t quite as they initially appeared. There are clearly far larger forces at play, pulling the strings from behind the scenes, which help explain some (though not all) of the machinations. I also like the slow reveal of information over the course of the series. We gradually learn about both Tokaku’s own background, and those of her ‘competitors’, which range from professionals to your average or garden psycho killers. Their styles of attack are equally varied: as well as the explosive devices mentioned above, there’s poison and even scissors attempted as methods of dispatch.

I was, frankly, a bit uncomfortable with the depictions of these fifteen-year-old girls. While there’s no actual nudity, the makers seem intent on coming as close as possible. That’s especially true of the bonus episode, in which the class is stranded on a desert island for a Battle Royale-style (though non-lethal) contest. Swimsuits-a-go-go. I’m on happier ground with the action – there’s some of that in just about every episode after the first – and the lack of romance (in part no doubt related to the lack of male characters) is also a plus. In the end, it’s a light enough entry to merit viewing, though I’m less sure about repeat value. It’s perhaps telling that I only finished watching it yesterday, and I already had to look up the heroine’s name.

Dir: Keizō Kusakawa
Star (voice): Ayaka Suwa, Hisako Kanemoto, Yoshino Nanjō, Takahiro Sakurai

The Huntress: Rune of the Dead

  By

★★
“Can’t see the wood for the trees. SO. Many. Trees…”

In 9th-century Scandinavia, teenage girl Runa (Stefansdotter) lives deep in the woods, with her mother, Magnhild (Idah), blind grandfather Ragnvald (Beck) and younger sister Bothild (Lyngbrant). Father Joar is notable by his absence, having gone off on a Viking raid to seek fortune for the family, and is now well overdue. However, he did at least train Runa to be a markswoman with the bow. Problems start when she finds a wounded warrior, Torulf, lying in the forest, and brings him back to their cabin, much against Magnhild’s wishes.

Torulf turns out to be a colleague of Joar’s, who tells a tale of the raiders looting a burial site – only to find vengeance coming out of the grave after them. He and Joar are the only two survivors. And when Joar returns shortly afterward, his arrival puts the whole group in peril, because of what’s inexorably following him. It’s only really at this point – two-thirds of the way in – that the film remotely begins to entertain. Up until this point, there has been a lot of sitting around the woods, and the director appears never to have heard of the maxim “Show, don’t tell.” Witness Torulf’s lengthy and frankly, boring, description of the situation, which would fit better into a Nordic saga recital than any cinematic retelling.

If the makers had gone for a siege type of film from the beginning, with the family barricaded in their cabin, and trying to fend off an unstoppable horde of barrow wights, this might have worked. It’s what I was expecting going in, and what I was waiting to see. And waiting. And waiting, while slow-moving coming of age family drama unfolded instead. I actually liked Stefansdotter in the lead role. Indeed, most of the performances are solid enough, and the same goes for the technical aspects. There was clearly some effort put in – the score, for example, is nicely done – and the forest provides a lushly appropriate backdrop against which any number of entertaining things might have unfolded. In a different, more interesting movie, anyway.

We finally do get the hand-to-hand (and hand-to-bow) battles for which we have been waiting. But only after a point by which the end credits would already be rolling on better-paced features. Even there, it is a bit on the dark side – though after my issues with Immortal Wars, the bar of what qualifies as “a bit on the dark side” has been raised considerably. This is nowhere near as bad, and you still can tell what’s going on, with a bit of peering. There’s a rough energy here which works, although the main impact is to make you wonder where the hell it has been for the rest of the movie. The makers should have sat down to watch the not-dissimilar Flukt, and built on what worked there, such as its steady flow of tension, instead of offering us 90 minutes of meandering around the woods.

Dir: Rasmus Tirzitis
Star: Moa Enqvist Stefansdotter, Yohanna Idha, Viva Östervall Lyngbrant, Ralf Beck

A Private War

  By

★★★
“You’re never going to get to where you’re going if you acknowledge fear.”

The profession of journalist is not exactly well-regarded by many people these days. So it’s nice occasionally to be reminded that they can still potentially be action heroes, risking their own lives in pursuit of the truth. In this case, it’s Marie Colvin (Pike), a foreign correspondent for London’s Sunday Times newspaper, who lost an eye while covering the civil strife in Sri Lanka, leading to a piratical eye-patch for the rest of her career. Most people would treat that as a sign from the universe to look into a change of profession. But Colvin was made of sterner stuff, despite a hellacious case of post-traumatic stress disorder, with which she largely coped by drinking heavily. So she and photographer sidekick Paul Conroy (Dornan) continue to venture into the world’s hot-spots, whether it’s Iraq, Libya or Syria. There, they expose the terrible human cost that the conflicts have on the local population, without apparent concern for their own safety.

It’s not a spoiler to say this doesn’t end well, for Colvin was indeed killed in Homs, Syria in a January 2012 explosion. And that’s kinda the thing which both drives the narrative and irritates the heck out of me. The film opens and closes with the quote from its subject at the top. However, to counter-quote her with Arthur Conan Doyle, “It is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you.” As depicted here, it seems as if the journalist almost had a death-wish, spitting in the face of danger long past what was prudent or even had much purpose. There’s little or no acknowledgement by Colvin that a dead writer won’t be able to achieve much. If you don’t get out safely to tell the stories you have gathered, what’s the point? You can argue, to some extent, it’s this and her other flaws which render its heroine human.

On the other hand, I found it extraordinarily hard to relate to Marie, with her choices and subsequent actions being so entirely alien to me. She insists on getting right to the core of suffering, even if this means asking its subjects brutal questions. Is this laudable journalism? Or a close cousin to the reporters who shove microphones at victims of tragedy and ask, “How do you feel?” Director Heinemann was responsible for the very good documentary Cartel Land, but seems to struggle a bit when he has to generate the narrative, rather than just recording it. We get only fragments that hint at Colvin’s character, such as a habit of wearing expensive bras, because she declares, “If anyone’s gonna pull my corpse from a trench, I want them to be impressed.” While there’s no denying the bravery of her chosen profession, or her qualifications for this site (albeit in the unorthodox wing!), and former Bond-girl Pike is excellent, I wasn’t left with any deeper appreciation of the why, rather than the how, of her life.

Dir: Matthew Heineman
Star: Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hollander, Stanley Tucci

Beyond Fear

  By

★★
“Carry on camping.”

Former WWF star Lesseos, where she was known as the Fabulous Mimi, carved out a small career for herself in low-budget action films, mostly in the mid-nineties. Though the ones we’ve covered before, such as Double Duty and Pushed to the Limit, aren’t exactly classics. This, unfortunately, continues that trend, with far too much sitting around campfires, and not enough action. Put another way, it’s a movie which is in tents, instead of intense. [Thank you, I’ll be here all week…] Lesseos plays wilderness guide and former mixed martial-arts fighter Tipper Taylor, who has been contracted to take a bunch of noobs out for a few days of camping. Unfortunately, one of them, Vince (Axelrod), happens to witness and videotape a murder at a campsite. The two perpetrators need to recover the incriminating footage, and set about stalking the party through the wilderness, abducting Vince in an effort to get him to hand over the cassette.

This eventually leads to what is largely the film’s sole redeeming feature: a fairly lengthy and not badly-staged rural brawl between Tipper and Boar (Bower), the most brutal of the villains. The key word, unfortunately, is “eventually”. Because, to reach that point, you have to sit through well over an hour of the most mind-numbing chit-chat you could possibly come up with. It feels as if the original script was some kind of ensemble relationship piece, onto which the makers decided at the last moment to bolt on some fisticuffs. This feels most obvious during our first exposure to the heroine’s talents, in a thoroughly clunky scene where she literally pulls over to try and break up a fight between two vagrants. Instead, everyone is given a deeply uninteresting back-story. For example, Vince and his wife are lottery winners, now working through problems with their marriage, and Tipper is feeling guilty over her final MMA fight, which left her best friend paralyzed.

None of which has anything to do with the main plot, and so can entirely be ignored. Though I can’t over-stress just how much of this nonsense there is. If you’re looking for an open-air soap-opera, this should be your jam. Which is a bit of a shame, as Lesseos brings an easy, likable charm to Tipper, making her someone for whom you want to root. Her fighting style is stiff –  though I should clarify, this is intended in the pro wrestling sense, meaning hard-hitting, It’s clear that’s where her background lies, with moves like drop-kicks not typically being part of the martial arts armoury! The problems here lie elsewhere, with a plot which just doesn’t foreground its action elements, never manages to set up Boar and his ally as any kind of credible threat, and all but entirely fails to explain why Vince never bothers telling anyone – least of all the authorities – about the snuff movie he recorded. Though I must confess to having laughed at the line in the trailer, “Mimi believes in women’s rights… lefts and uppercuts,” it’s all remarkably poorly thought-out, and I couldn’t help feeling that Mimi deserves better.

Dir: Robert F. Lyons
Star: Mimi Lesseos, Verrel Reed, Robert Axelrod, Wayne Bower

Touch of Iron, by Timandra Whitecastle

  By

Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

Owen and Noraya Smith are twins, in a world where such siblings are looked upon as cursed. Brought up as charcoal burners, they leave their village so Nora can avoid an arranged and unwanted marriage, and have the forture – whether good- or ill- remains to be decided – quickly to encounter the party of Prince Basham. He is scouring the country in search of a magical artifact called the Living Blade, which will grants its wielder great power. Assisting him is the half-wight Telen Diaz, a pilgrim/fighter. Owen joins the party, hoping to become a pilgrim himself; Nora decides to return home, but that option is removed from her as the village has been taken over by bandits. Fortunately, Diaz has followed her and is able to lend assistance when necessary. Nora eventually becomes his student in the fighting arts, and they all head to the temple/brothel of Shinar where the immortal seer Suranna can provide insight to the blade’s location. But the cost of her information is perilously high, since she has plans for both Nora and Diaz.

I believe this is what’s called “grimdark” fantasy fiction, which is basically as it sounds: in its simplest terms, think Game of Thrones rather than Lord of the Rings. I’ve no problem with the resulting “mature” content. Much of it here does seem necessary to the plot, though the concept of a vast, hidden city in the middle of nowhere that’s a gigantic, all-encompassing pleasure palace does pose certain logistical queries. There was also something slightly creepy about teenage Nora increasingly crushing hard on eighty-seven-year old Diaz – even if half-wights, like half-elves, age very well. I have a couple of other nitpicks. An almost entirely untrained Nora is capable of going all ninja and taking out an entire platoon of brigands. And there’s an assault on the city that comes out of nowhere, and whose purpose and participants both seem ill-defined.

With the negatives out of the way, on the positive side, I really liked Nora. She has a very sharp character arc over the course of the novel, but always seems to have been a bit of a bad-ass, even as a charcoal burner. It’s clear there’s a very significant future in front of her, and I sense she and Suranna will end up facing off down the road. I appreciated the way the heroine largely doesn’t care about the Living Blade; such apathy is pleasantly refreshing, though I suspect that opinion is going to change before long. Whitecastle has a good eye for world-building as well, giving the reader enough of an impression, without getting bogged down in too many details. It appears future volumes may concentrate more on Diaz. As I found him about the least interesting of the major characters, that will stop me shelling out for more. Still, as a one-off this made for an entertaining enough read, though I felt the first half, before they arrived at Shinar, was stronger and more interesting.

Author: Timandra Whitecastle
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 3 in the Living Blade series.

Locked Up (TV)

  By

★★★
“Back behind bars.”

While this Spanish series started off back in 2015, it perhaps suffers through not having been watched until recently – in the wake of shows like Wentworth and The Yard. There are too many elements which left me feeling “Hang on: haven’t I seen that somewhere before?” For instance, the thread where a motherly inmate gets Alzheimer’s and pleads with her cell-mates to kill her before it destroys her mind entirely? Liz Birdsworth, in seasons six and seven of Wentworth. So, I guess your opinion on this may vary, depending on your familiarity with the genre. Also like Wentworth, the main protagonist is someone who is not a hardened criminal – but ends up becoming one, over the course of the show. 

In this case, that is Macarena Ferreiro (Civantos). She gets seven years after becoming the patsy for her boss’s fraud. She stumbles across the location of a robbery haul, which brings her into conflict with… Well, just about everyone, but the key persona is Zulema Zahir (Lobato), the top dog of the prison. The five seasons (40 episodes in total) revolve around their love-hate relationship, though as usual, there are a good number of side stories and supporting characters, on both sides of the bars. Again, some of these may feel rather familiar, with the show going through the usual tropes of power struggles, warders good and bad, and criminal activities. It’s solid enough (and offers more nudity than the other shows, if that’s of interest!), just all too familiar at this point.

The show was originally cancelled after the second series, but after a significant pause was then revived for a third and fourth season. That delay required significant cast changes, due to the cast having moved on – Civantos’s other commitments meant Macarena became a secondary character. They also had to “transfer” to a new prison, as their existing sets had been taken over by another show (Money Heist, also on Netflix). But the real weirdness begins after the end of Season 4, which has an air of absolute finality to it. But, wait! There’s more! For Vis a vis: El oasis, followed. Set a decade later, Macarena and Zulema have teamed up, to become an armed robbery duo. 

They recruit some of their old pals to pull off the dreaded ‘one last heist’, robbing the wedding of a cartel boss’s daughter. Needless to say, it goes about as well as ‘one last heists’ always do. Initially, it feels a bit like an unwanted supplement. But it ends up as probably the most relevant to this site, with the women holed up in a motel, in the middle of the desert, and under siege by the boss’s army. By going outside the prison walls, this offers most scope for genuine invention, and it’s likely why I felt this to be the strongest season. I just wish I hadn’t had to go through four series of generic prison drama to reach it.

Created by:  Iván Escobar, Esther Martínez Lobato, Álex Pina, Daniel Écija
Star: Maggie Civantos, Najwa Nimri, Carlos Hipólito, Roberto Enríquez
a.k.a. Vis A Vis (Face to Face)

Annie Oakley (film)

  By

★★★
“Annie Gets Her Gun.”

While not exactly an accurate retelling of the life of noted sure-shot Annie Oakley, this is breezily entertaining. Indeed, you can make a case for this being one of the earliest “girls with guns” films to come out in the talking pictures era. There’s no denying Oakley (Stanwyck) qualifies here. The first time we see her, she’d delivering a load of game birds – all shot through the head to avoid damaging the flesh – to her wholesaler. When barnstorming sharpshooter Toby Walker (Foster) blows into town, Annie ends up in a match with him, which she ends up throwing, due in part to her crush on him. She still gets a job alongside Walker, in the Wild West show run by the renowned ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody (Olsen) and his partner, Jeff Hogarth (Douglas). But Annie and Toby’s relationship fractures after he accidentally shoots her in the hand, while concealing an injury affecting his sight.

This hits the ground running, and roughly the first third plays decades ahead of its time. Don’t forget, this was made only fifteen years after women were granted the right to vote across the entire United States. Its depiction of a strong, perfectly independent woman as personified by Stanwyck is great – there’s also Walker’s former “friend,” Vera Delmar (Perl Kelton). When sternly warned the saloon she’s about to enter is no place for a lady, she breezily replies, “Oh, I’m no lady.” I’m quite impressed this was able to get through, given the rigid imposition of the strict Hays Code, beginning the previous year, with its goal “that vulgarity and suggestiveness may be eliminated.”

Almost inevitably, it can’t maintain this pace. There’s too much footage of the Wild West Show, which seems to consist largely of people on horses milling around the arena. I guess people were easily satisfied in those days. Meanwhile, the romance between Oakley and Walker (an entirely artificial construction, with Walker never existing as an actual person), fails to be convincing. Somewhat more interesting is the portrayal of Chief Sitting Bull, the Native American warrior who also became part of Wild Bill’s show. While depicted largely for comic relief – witness the scene where he turns out the gas lights in his bedroom by shooting at them – he is played by a genuine Indian, Chief Thunder Bird, which is considerably more progressive than some movies. He is also instrumental in Annie and Toby’s reconciliation.

Stanwyck does an excellent job of depicting the heroine, portraying her as someone absolutely confident in her own talents. I’d like to have seen more development of her character: as is, the one we see delivering quail at the start of the film, is almost identical to the one we see making up with Toby in its final shot. Sadly, the subject didn’t live to see her life immortalized in film, having died nine years before this was released. I think she’d probably have been quite pleased with her depiction.

Dir: George Stevens
Star: Barbara Stanwyck, Preston Foster, Melvyn Douglas, Moroni Olsen

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