Indian Agent

Tim Holt and Richard Martin are trying to get a ranch started, just as Nan Leslie is trying to get her paper started. When an Indian baby shows up at the boys' house, they try to care for the infant in the usual, ham-handed, comic way, but it leads to a story of crooked Indian agent Harry Woods, and some nice plot complications, with the location shots in the handsome Alabama Hills.

The legend is that Hollywood and the B westerns always treated Indians as evil savages until BROKEN ARROW. That's simply not true. While the A westerns often had battles with the Indians, that was an expensive shoot. Usually the Bs ignored Indians, had one or two for background characters... or made use of the Crooked Indian Agent plot. That's what we have here, in RKO's long-running and popular series of Bs, two years before Jewish Jeff Chandler played Indians and cowboys.

Not being a big expert in this genre I could never understand what made Tim Holt make so many of these b Westerns after the dizzy artistic heights of the Magnificent Ambersons in 1941. Money necessity or simple love? Anyway, I've always enjoyed watching his films, first time for this one which has just been shown on UK cable TV at peak time - with a grotty print too!

Bad White Men milk Indians on their reservation dry, pocketing money as the Indians and their families go hungry and the young braves get more and more warlike. Tim and his sidekick breeze into it all when Chief Red Fox's wife leaves her baby with them to look after - the reason why leaves them startled. Later Tim gets accused of shooting Red Fox and is temporarily arrested, getting it in the neck from both races as a result. Does it all get sorted out with much chases and shootings in an arid and very sunny landscape - you guess!

On a serious level the racial message propounded although delivered with a bit of condescension in this was one of sensitive tolerance and almost PC for 1948, in marked contrast to the retrogressive and aggressively unfunny stance taken by Brooks' Blazing Saddles 26 years later in this PC age. I never intend to watch the latter film again, but I hope to be spared to revisit this satisfactory potboiler sometime.

When government agent Hutchins stops delivery of food supplies to an Indian reservation, the natives understandably become restless. Cowpunchers Dave and Chito stop the Indians from going on the warpath but then they have to find out what is happening to the missing supplies ...

An above average Tim Holt western that paints a sympathetic treatment of Native Americans, with the white guys clearly the ones in the wrong, namely crooked businessman Harry Woods and corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs agent Tom Keene who have conspired to steal supplies from the local tribe and sell them to a nearby mining town. Holt and Chito discover this and plans to stop them in the usual slam bang manner. The narrative has a spring in its step and there's a human quality in this entry.

Indian Agent finds Tim Holt and Richard Martin getting themselves involved with some bottom feeding Indian Agent played by Tom Keane who is stealing government supplies consigned by the Bureau Of Indian Affairs for Noah Beery, Jr. and the tribe he is chief of. But perennial western villain Woods has a whole new idea, he's going to say the supplies never arrived and sell them to prospector's at a gold strike area who are paying top dollar for them. If you remember in the much bigger budgeted Bend Of The River that was idea in that film as well although the ones being swindled weren't Indians. Woods is the freighter and he and Keene are in on this scheme together.

To show how desperate they are Beery and his wife Claudia Drake leave their baby at Holt and Martin's ranch and one Chito Jose Gonzalez Bustamante Rafferty takes quite a shine to the toddler. And you only Chito liked big girls. That gets Holt's attention and newspaper reporter Nan Leslie follows with the scoop of the year.

Although Indian Agent does not rank up there with Broken Arrow, Devil's Doorway and Fort Apache as a western sympathetic to the Indian point of view it was nice to see their issues filtering down to the B picture kid market as well.