Fighting Caravans

..and directors Otto Brower and David Burton, very loosely based on a Zane Grey novel. Gary Cooper stars as scout Clint Belmet, a hard-drinking troublemaker who nonetheless gets hired to escort a large wagon train west to California. Along with his crusty pals Bill (Ernest Torrence) and Jim (Tully Marshall), he finds the safest path through the hills, and away from "wild Injuns". He also makes time with solo pioneer woman Felice (Lili Damita).

Paramount hoped to make this a real epic, but it gets bogged down in cliches, pointless character digressions, and some miscasting. Damita has trouble with her English, while Cooper looks too clean and neat to be hanging around with the sloppy likes of Torrence and Marshall: where does he keep getting his clothes laundered, and why aren't his pals using the same service? There's a big barroom brawl scene played for laughs, and the inevitable Indian attack, but the outcome of this is obvious from the opening credits. Speaking of which, one of the few stylistic touches I liked was having Native Americans in costume walking toward the camera during the credits, obscuring words and even blacking out the screen.

During the Civil War, FIGHTING CARAVANS of freight wagons make their way West, crossing hostile Indian country.

This sturdy Zane Grey Western, largely forgotten over the decades, offers some fine entertainment with its good performances and vivid location filming. The number of wagons, livestock and extras used show that Paramount Studios paid out a fair few pennies for decent production values. The dramatic struggles across the wilderness and a rousing Indian attack help punch up the action considerably.

Laconic Gary Cooper stars as the trail guide helping to lead the teamsters and settlers through dangerous territory. Hot-tempered Lili Damita plays a solitary French maiden driving her wagon West. Their intermittent romance is completely predictable, but the two young performers make it all very watchable.

Stealing their every scene are a pair of old pros from the Silent days: Ernest Torrence & Tully Marshall. Playing a couple of grizzled, drunken, women-hating trail guides--as well as Coop's best buddies--they are very amusing in their attempts to break-up the budding romance between their protégé and the troubling Miss Damita.

Rotund Eugene Palette is on hand as a lovelorn member of the wagon train. Charles Winninger enlivens the film's opening minutes as the blustery Marshal of Independence, Missouri.

Movie mavens will recognize sweet Jane Darwell as a pioneer and Iron Eyes Cody as a Fort Indian in search of firewater, both uncredited.

let's weigh the merits of this film: (1) a strikingly handsome (and tall), youthful Gary Cooper -- this is the opportunity to see a giant screen legend when he was a vibrant young newcomer! This alone merits seeing this movie. (2) The dialogue is witty, pithy and fun -- in fact, give me the screenwriter from 1931 over most of today's movies!. (3) There is a lot of fast-paced and exciting western action (and the stuntwork is just plain fun to watch). Yes, this was relatively early movie making, and in some ways it shows, but that also provides tremendous enjoyment for the film buff. Watch it with a light heart, but with reverence for the old films, and I think you can't help but enjoy it.

"The old time west is passing," says one of the characters in "Fighting Caravans." This early 'talkie' is also one of the earliest 'big budget' westerns from what I read. Unfortunately, this is a B Movie all the way, and not that entertaining either. A young Gary Cooper plays a scout of some sort who is working for a wagon train caravan carrying freight from Missouri to Sacramento, California in the 1860's during the civil war and right before the railroads had been built throughout the west. There is hardship, danger, Indians, romance and cornball humor in this vintage western. Somehow, when you mix them all up together, the recipe isn't all that tasty. The humor is obnoxious at times and the acting, even Gary Cooper's, is noticeably weak during some scenes. This movie tries to be several different types of movies all rolled in to one and it doesn't pull it off. Interestingly enough, there are moments in the film where it is evident that the style of acting and camera work from silent films is still being used. It is a bit fascinating to see how an early 1930's filmmaker portrayed the 1860's. I'd say pass on this movie unless you are a Gary Cooper fan or a hard core fan of early westerns. 61/100.

This film, Originally titled BLAZING ARROWS, is the first of several based upon a Zane Grey novel published only two years prior, and the version that is most faithful to the book, while being one of the largest budgeted Westerns of the early sound era, with the viewer advised to remember that the period of the narrative (1862) antedated its audience only to the extent that the Great Depression does to spectators today. The story tells of a caravan of freight wagons journeying from Independence, Missouri, to the West Coast during a pre-railroad time, with settlers accompanying, and the procession's four month struggle with hostile Indians, very harsh winter weather, forbidding terrain and renegade betrayal, and is particularly full of interesting detail as to the methods of the freightmen and their metier. Gary Cooper portrays Clint Belmet, a Missouri guide who has been reared and trained as a member of a successive generation of scouts and trappers by two veterans of the breed, Bill Jackson (Ernest Torrence) and Jim Bridger (Tully Marshall), who are unaware that their way of life is to be ended by an advancing intracontinental rail system, only temporarily slowed by the War Between the States. Because of plot circumstances, Belmet must pretend to be married to a lone traveller, Felice (Lily Damita), and their seesaw relationship provides one of the main themes of a wideranging scenario, with Belmet and his mentors trumpeting of the glories of their fading way of life while Felice seeks to inculcate within her swain a sense of domestic virtue. The cinematography of Lee Garmes is very effective with its images of the travails of the wagon train and his work is not compromised by the editing which is crisp and appropriate for a film as episodic as is this one. The work's most serious failing is a lack of a consistent point of view, as it is essentially a comedy, due largely to a highly effectual performance from Torrence, here permitted to utilize his native Scottish burr to its fullest, and is somewhat reduced in impact during scenes of action and romance as a result of only cursory emphasis upon each.