Copper Sky

Tenpercent's review pretty much nails my view of this stinker. Yep, a very, VERY badly-written "African Queen" rip-off.

Too bad, because there are actually a few tinkling of something really good beneath all the stink. Well, basically the tinklings are all due to Coleen Gray. Good Lord, is she beautiful, and a fine actress to boot. I had never heard of her before seeing this film, and am amazed that she wasn't more famous.

Jeff Morrow is so bad in this, I'm shocked to see he still had a career afterward.

But the real culprit is whatever drug-addict wrote the screenplay. Painful.

If you have never seen Coleen Gray, it is worth watching the first 20 minutes or so (until she lets her hair down and bathes in the river.) After that, it's simply torture.

i have not seen this film for over 40 years, at least. i loved it then and long to see if my memories of it have held up over the years. the main character was sleeping off a drunk in the jail house when the indians attack and left him the sole survivor. his journey has him meet the female lead, for a person of my age there was some "mushy stuff" but there was a few scenes that were erotic and may even hold up, today. if there is any way to see this film again, i am waiting to find out.

I think there is a real problem here with what could have been a real 'sleeper' - a modest, but potentially good, film. That problem is the continuity. This movie has a thrown together look, with scenes that don't match, and with dialog that is sometimes spoken as if some climax is about to happen, but never does.

I loved Jeff Morrow in this - he seems to be in a completely different (and better) picture than most of the rest of the cast. Colleen Gray is very pretty, but why is she all dolled up and coiffed in a 1950s beehive-type hairdo if she's out in the Wild West? In typical Hollywood style, no matter what befalls her, her lipstick never smears.

The actors are called upon to suffer many hardships, and one minute they are walking in the desert, and the next they are walking next to a stream near some woods, and how they got there is never accounted for. I couldn't keep track of when they had a wagon and horse, and when they didn't. Events sometimes seem to unfold backwards.

That isn't the actors fault. It's annoying, but it shouldn't detract from the performances, and the kernel of a good story that just never develops properly. It should lead the viewer to speculate about how this movie could have been a bit better. Maybe someone will remake it some day.

The first problem that Copper Sky has is that when you give a film a title of that with all the images of desert heat that the mind conjures up, color would have been essential. But this was a B western and the budget just didn't call for it.

That was a pity because this could have gotten a notch or two higher in the ratings from me. Pedestrian direction was also a problem. The obvious comparison to The African Queen has been made by many. Let's not forget that in addition to Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, The African Queen also had the services of John Huston.

Jeff Morrow plays a former cavalryman jailed for shooting an Apache because he was in the vicinity of the killing and scheduled to be hanged. But an interesting twist of fate as Morrow is locked in his cell passed out dead drunk, the entire town is massacred with him the only survivor. I'm still trying to figure out how he got out of the locked cell.

But he did whereupon he runs into new school teacher Coleen Gray, fresh from Boston and experiencing her first encounter with hostile Apaches. The two are forced together by circumstance to seek shelter and safety and to do it they have to cross the desert.

Like Hepburn and Bogey, Morrow and Gray are on screen together most of the film and they have the burden carrying it. A director like John Huston would have helped enormously.

Copper Sky is a decent enough programmer, but it had potential that was squandered.

From the beginning of the film, when Jeff Morrow arrives in a town where everyone is dead until the end, Copper Sky piques the interest more than a low-budget Western normally does.

There is an erotic tension between Coleen Gray's character and Jeff Morrow's which also is unusual in a film like this. At first Gray is prim and proper and later on becomes attracted to Morrow.

The killing of an Indian in the film is very different also. In most films, killing of Native Americans is treated very casually. Here, the murder is depicted realistically as Gray's character goes from initial empathy with the Indian to revulsion at the killing to understanding that it had to be done.

Unusual in all respects, the film is worth watching.