Brave Warrior

Brave Warrior is directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet and written by Robert E. Kent. It stars Jon Hall, Christine Larson, Jay Silverheels and Michael Ansara. Filmed in Technicolor with photography by William V. Skall, the plot is loosely based around the events of the War of 1812 and the Battle of Tippecanoe.

"This is a story of two men in a town all drawn by a strong destiny into the maelstrom that was to be the War of 1812 between the United States and England. One of these men was an American, Steven Ruddell, the other was Tecumseh, greatest of all Indian chiefs. Who had his head quarters at the town of Tippecanoe, home of the Shawnee Indians. The fuse was burning close to the powder keg of war when a flat boat carrying a shipment of salt from Vincennes, capital of the United States territory of Indiana, sailed up the Wabash river bound for Tippencanoe………"

History gets fudged as the makers produce a film that looks real nice, but is a dull as dish water on an entertainment level. Silverheels turns in a good show, but the makers fail to give the character the dignity he warranted, while Skall's capturing of the scenic locale at Simi Valley, California, is of a high calibre. Everything else feels unnatural, almost as if the production team hadn't a clue how to make this little slice of history into a feature length movie. Mercifully it clocks in at a short 73 minutes, but for many, myself included, that's 73 minutes too long. 3/10

The only thing the real Tecumseh and this film's Tecumseh have in common is they were both Native Americans. Following on the heels of the successful Broken Arrow with James Stewart and Jeff Chandler as The Apache Leader Cochise,Hollywood flirted with the Indian as A Sympathetic Figure for a moment in series of films of dwindling quality. Columbia got on the bandwagon with this non epic depicting the historic Tecumseh as wishing to live in peace with the advancing White Eyes. In reality Tecumseh led a bloody campaign that for a brief moment seemed to be on the point of keeping the Midwest Native. The Indian Wars East of the Mississippi were far more bloodier than the ones John Ford,Raoul Walsh and others portrayed for the movie going public. Anyway The Bad White Eye and the Bad Indian ruin everything even causing the scene from the Glen Ford William Holden western The Man From Colorado of a burning town to be used again. So historical no as usual, action packed in recompense, no. Worth a peek only if you need to.

The Brave Warrior in this title refers to the Shawnee chief Tecumseh who made a valiant effort to unite Indian tribes against encroaching Americans going over the Appalachians and settling in Indiana Territory. Jay Silverheels plays Tecumseh and his one-eyed brother The Prophet is played by Michael Ansara. But if you're expecting to see the real story of the Battle Of Tippecanoe than skip this one by. I would recommend a made for TV film about Tecumseh that stars Jesse Borrego that came out in the Nineties.

The white hero of this film is the fictional Steve Ruddell played by Jon Hall. Hall is a confidential agent sent by President Madison to find out about British agents stirring up the various tribes. Not that there wasn't enough stirring in the other direction from a group of young Turk Southern and Western Congressmen, among them Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. But that's real history.

According to this Hall is the one in charge not Governor William Henry Harrison and he's giving James Seay who plays Harrison orders. Harrison is also not in uniform which is one of the many inaccuracies about Brave Warrior. Harrison in fact was a military man and was most definitely in charge.

It's B film from Columbia so do not expect any high standards. The whole thing is shot on a western set and looks nothing like Indiana in the early 19th century.

Skip this trip to Tippecanoe.

Jay Silverheels is Tecumseh, persuasively arguing that this is Indiana, after all, as Jon Hall tries to keep the peace, even as one-eyed Michael Ansara tries to make trouble. This causes the Blackhawk War. No, Abraham Lincoln doesn't show up, but you do have James Seay as William Harry Harrison.

William Skall shoots the Battle of Tippicanoe in Technicolor very nicely if all too briefly, but this wouldn't be a Sam Katzman production with the incompetent Spencer Gordon Bennett directing if there wasn't something odious about the production, and here's it's performances, with most of the performers speaking like they've never used words before.

This is a reasonable Western with plenty of interesting points for students of the genre. For a start it has a Native American in a starring role. (There may be other instances of this in films made in the mid-20th century but none come to mind.) Jay Silverheels is Tecumseh, the Brave Warrior of the title, though his physical heroism is confined to a knife fight with his brother; his bravery relates more to his wisdom in coming to terms with white Americans, even building a town like one of theirs in which to house his people. He may be ahead of his time in social planning, but he is surely unwise in showing interest in the white heroine. Silverheels does well in this role, certainly when compared with his poker face and wooden lines as Tonto in the Lone Ranger series.

Very few of Jon Hall's films have made it to British TV, so it was good to see him. The rest of the cast do well enough, though their faces are unfamiliar to me and their names do not appear in Quinlan's directories of film actors. Katherine Larson looks and performs better than many heroines in Westerns of this era.

Best of all, it is an "early" Western, set in the early 1810s as tensions mount between Britain and the United States. The Brits are the baddies, but not too much so, thus there is novelty in the plot. The civilian clothes and army uniforms are of the period, as are the single-shot weapons, even if these seem to be reloaded incredibly quickly, especially in the river skirmish that opens the film.

The plot seemed to have an historical basis, so I checked, to discover, not surprisingly, that the film had tampered with the facts.Tecumseh and his brother appear to have been on better terms in real life, and they did found a "town" for their people, but whether this was on white men's lines is not stated.And though the film portrays Tecumseh as being on the side of the United States, after the events it depicts he did join the British side. (One does wonder what damage all these inaccurate Westerns did to people's understanding of American history.)