Turner Classic Movies recently showed Lesley Selander's Fort Vengeance, from 1953, in a tribute to Rito Moreno, whose part is small indeed, with one good scene of her dancing. Selander is sometimes listed as the most prolific of Western directors, having directed 107 Westerns from 1935 to 1967, after which he shifted to TV. In 1951 Selander directed eight films, not all of them Westerns. The script for Fort Vengeance was an original screenplay by Daniel Ullman, who wrote many B films, and photographed by Harry Neumann, who photographed many B films.
The pleasures of a Western --like other genres, including horror and film noir -- include the tension between the conventions of the genre and the derivations from it. Some of the greatest directors (Anthony Mann, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Budd Boetticher, et al.) put a very personal stamp on their Westerns, often using genre conventions with particular insights and analyses of them. Sam Peckinpah said that anything could be a Western and Selander and Ullman have an interesting approach: Fort Vengeance is a Western that takes place in Canada just after the battle of The Little Bighorn, as Sitting Bull flees to Canada and tries to stir up the Blackfeet. The cavalry are pursuing Sitting Bull while two gunmen (James Craig and Keith Larsen) escape a posse by crossing the Canadian border and joining the newly-formed Northwest Mounted Police, whose files of red coats in the wilderness are a visual motif throughout the film. The Mounties, led by Reginald Denny, want to keep the peace and don't want the involvement of American troops, who offer to attack and kill the Indians. Keith Larsen steals furs that the Indians have trapped and almost provokes a war, until his brother tracks down and kills him in a shoot-out and the peace of the Queen is kept.
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