Reviews

The end of an era. Cops in suits with narrow ties and fedoras, worn inside and out, day and night. Lincoln sedans with rear suicide doors. Women in bright colours, hats, and fully made up stay at home wives. The bad guys and near criminals in mauves and plush velour at the edge of the beatnik fringe. Dial telephones, typewriters, carbon paper, no computers, cops using phone booths and carrying dimes, cigarettes and booze everywhere, adultery, a near drunken sexual assault, all 60's stuff at the end of an era. Widmark is too old to have both a hot wife and an ongoing pleutonic relationship with a nightclub singer. He is also a nice guy one minute and physically threatening an old lady the next or kicking down a door without a warrant. He can't carry off the bad cop and rule breaker role. There is a subplot with police corruption and the straight laced commissioner learns too bend a little with advice from his married girlfriend. There is a second subplot with a potential racial police incident with a black suspect. The finale is pre-SWAT teams with the two detectives breaking through a door armed with two handguns each in a shootout reminiscent of a B western. Forget the plot, with its many flaws, and focus on the New York and the sixties look and feel

We watched this movie thinking it was a docudrama and would provide information about the real story. I read the book written by the women who was the 'true' main character and the only factual thing in this movie are a couple of names and the fact that the two horses were stranded. The movie changed the characters and their involvement, left out several of the main players, altered the story time line, and then fictionalized about 90% of the movie. The result is a very bad telling of the event including a preposterous wolf attack. The actual story is fascinating and is not well served by this TV movie melodramatic script that is so flimsily based on the real events. Tragic, it could have been done so much better.

Army troop captures a renegade Apache leader and his followers which includes a white woman captive who is the mother of the leader's half breed son. The woman chooses to keep her son and take him with her. The sergeant is put in charge of returning the woman with her child to the woman's husband. The white soldiers, their wives and many of the other people they encounter are negative towards the woman, what she endured and her wanting to keep her son. The boy's father escapes and attempts to recover his son and return him to the Apache tribe knowing the boy will not be accepted in the white world. Almost identical story line to a later film, The Stalking Moon, starring Gregory Peck. Shot in black and white, this is definitely a B western with a low grade TV movie feel and some poor moving effects. Not a great western or one of Stanwyck's or McRae's better efforts.