DEVIL'S DOORWAY (1950) B/W 83m dir: Anthony Mann

w/Robert Taylor, Louis Calhern, Paula Raymond, Marshall Thompson, James Mitchell, Edgar Buchanan, Spring Byington

A Native American who's a veteran of the Civil War returns to find injustice and tragedy for his people, and he fights to help them. This interesting genre film that takes the Indian's point of view was the first in a series of groundbreaking westerns that Anthony Mann directed throughout the 1950s.

From Jim Kitses' landmark book, Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship within the Western: "Three neglected works, Devil's Doorway, The Last Frontier and Cimarron, are relevant here. Spanning the period under discussion [the 1950s], these differ from the films thus far considered [THE NAKED SPUR, THE FAR COUNTRY, WINCHESTER '73, THE MAN FROM LARAMIE] in that they focus on inversions of the typical hero. Essentially, the central characters here are stable, controlled, healthy men; and as such --- paradoxically --- there is no place for them within the community. Thus in the sadly overlooked and surprisingly tough Indian picture, Devil's Doorway, Robert Taylor's Broken Lance, the Shoshone chief who as a Union soldier had won a Congressional Medal of Honour, now finds that under the Homesteading Act Indians cannot own land. 'Civilization's a great thing.' Attempts to petition the government fail, and Lance is driven to lead his few braves in a pathetic defence of their home against a local posse bolstered by Union cavalry. His dream of a model community shattered, the idealistic Lance dons his old uniform and moves out into the wreckage to take a bullet and walk, more dead than alive, to the officer opposite who salutes him before he dies. Here Mann had a character of great purity and elemental drive. Society cannot contain such a man , and accordingly the hero is deified, becoming a kind of mythic spirit. As in El Cid ten years later, the film ends on a strange note of dark exaltation --- victory through death --- and celebrates the uncompromising quality of the character."