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DON COLLIER'S MOVIES Massacre River
The opening of the Great West wrote one of the most romantic and impelling chapters in American history. Events of the advancing frontier, retreating Indians fighting with primitive instinct to protect their land, and white men struggling to create new worlds brought strange destinies. Over the plains came the pioneers, good men and bad. The unscrupulous mistreated white man and red alike, violated the Indians' treaties, shot his buffalo, and set him on the warpath. This particular story happened in these disputed rangelands and lawless border towns. It is a time of high adventure, when men fought and died for what they wanted, ending the old way of life and starting the new. To protect the settlers and to keep western trails open, Army posts sprang up. They were islands of strength in the wasteland. In this story, the Army post was vital in the land of the Washakie River. On its banks, so many clashes and ambushes had flared that it earned the forbidding name: Massacre River. By all accounts, this is Don Collier's first picture, and it is really not all that bad a western. The only problem is threefold: 1) either he is one of the soldier, and we do not know which one, or 2) he is one of the men in the blue Moon saloon, and we do not know which one, or 3) he has donned a black wig and is playing the part of one of the Indians, and we do not know which one. He may actually have been all three, since extras do a lot of different things. In any event, he was about 20 years old when he made this film. He mentioned once something about Johnny Sands in passing, but whether or not he doubled for Johnny Sands has yet to be learned. This movie starts off great. It focuses on the conflict of the Indians and the white man in Wyoming during the expansion of the West, but about twenty minutes into it, everything goes to slow-motion with the prerequisite love triangle. From then onward, it is the old story of two women falling for the same man, Larry Knight, only in this case, it is told from Knight's point of view. One of the women is from the school of hard knocks, Laura Jordan, which is his side of the tracks, and the other is from the genteel society of St. Louis, Kitty Reid, purportedly beyond his reach, only he manages to capture her affections in spite of himself. This action, of course, alienates him to his best friend, Phil Acton, who is also madly in love with Kitty, and it alienates him to Randy Reid, Kitty's brother. As with all love triangles, it ultimately sets off a chain of events which leaves one man dead, and Larry and Laura fleeing for their lives through hostile Indian territory. In pursuit is Phil Acton, representing the Army.
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