The US Cavalry had been, traditionally, such heroes, always arriving, bugles blowing, at the last moment, to save wagon trains, forts and besieged settlers clearly they were going to be recast as villains. It was inevitable that Custer would come under revisionist fire too. In 1976 it would be that Western icon Buffalo Bill’s turn to be debunked by Robert Altman in Buffalo Bill and the Indians. We have already seen on this blog how oaters demolished former heroes like Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid in pictures such as Doc (1971) and Dirty Little Billy (1972). But these were mere hints of what was to come once the high tide of the revisionist Western hit in the early 1970s. Douglas Kennedy’s Custer in Sitting Bull (1954), for example, was arrogant and heedless of Dale Robertson’s wise advice, and in The Great Sioux Massacre (1965) Philip Carey’s version is cynically anti-Indian and of uncertain equilibrium mentally, at least later in the story. We got the occasional quite negative portrayal of Custer in the 1950s and 60s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |