Red Tomahawk
After Custer's defeat an army captain tries to warn a small town that the Sioux are coming. The inhabitants own two machine-guns but don't want to lend them to him.
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- Cast：
- Howard Keel , Joan Caulfield , Broderick Crawford , Scott Brady , Wendell Corey , Richard Arlen , Tom Drake
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Reviews
Powerful
A Masterpiece!
It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.
An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.
Howard Keel devoted a bit of time to Red Tomahawk in his memoirs the same way Charlton Heston did with Major Dundee. Not because the finished product was a cinematic masterpiece but because the making of it might be a great movie script itself.Along around 1968 Keel did three films for producer A.C.Lyles known for making low budget westerns with players who'd seen better days. Keel says in his memoirs the first two were done and this third one was done because Lyles had lots of stock footage of Indian attacks so a script was created around the attacks. Keel is an army captain who has just seen what was left of General Custer and his men at Little Big Horn and races to the town of Deadwood where it's rumored there are Gatling Guns. With two of them there Keel makes a Solomon like decision as to their use for both the town and the army in need of an equalizer.Along the way Keel picks up Scott Brady and Broderick Crawford as sidekicks and does a little romance with saloon queen Joan Caulfield.Caulfield replaced Betty Hutton whom A.C.Lyles hired then fired. Keel with some reluctance said that he was grateful for the part as he like the rest of the A.C.Lyles regulars wasn't getting much work any more. Hutton who was his co-star in Annie Get Your Gun and with whom he had some bad work history there in Keel's own words acted like Norma Desmond in her return to the Paramount lot. Very shortly afterward Lyles decided he was not putting up with it.In the end Red Tomahawk was a pretty mediocre B western and not even one of the best of A.C. Lyles work.But it sounds like the making of it might be good film. Read Howard Keel's memoirs, there's even more.