Os Rifles da Desforra

I have ridden horses all my life and when you are out in the middle of nowhere and dismount, the last thing you do is turn your horse loose, you tie them up. In this movie, several times, people just dismount and leave the horse to wonder off. REALLY! How stupid! Gee, it's only thirty eight miles back to the fort, I don't have any water or food so I think I'll just turn O'l Buck loose. How unrealistic.

It's a good thing they're making a movie and the horses get breaks along with the actors or they would keel over dead from all that running. And after all that running, they don't sweat. Strange too they can be ridden all day and never seem to need to eat. Or poop.

Guns are LOUD. Yet no one ever flinches or even reacts to the noise. And rifles are discharged just inches from horse's heads and they don't even react. Either the horses are completely deaf, or those runs are really quiet.

I could go on. I can never understand why a movie producer or director will go to all the trouble and spend mucho dollars and end up with a film with so many obvious errors.

Director William Witney is no John Ford. But it's doubtful that even the great Ford could have done anything with this lame western which has possibly one of the dullest screenplays ever written.

Saddled with bad material, it's no wonder that AUDIE MURPHY finds himself floundering about in a role that's so poorly written, he never has a chance. The actor himself admitted to being a "no talent" when it came to screen acting, and here he really gets his chance to prove it. The only other respectable performance in the film is given by KENNETH TOBEY, usually Mr. Nice, here cast as the bad guy who wants to sell rifles to the Indians and ends up in a heap of trouble when Audie decides to single-handedly take care of the situation and put Tobey and his cronies out of business. It takes more than an hour to get to this situation and by that time it's doubtful whether anyone was left watching.

Filmed in muddy color with some interesting background scenery the only thing to dwell on during long stretches of dull dialog, it's no wonder Murphy's career was in decline by the time he did this film away from his home studio, Universal. Unfortunately, a tragic plane accident took his life only a few years later.

Audie Murphy plays a tough, by-the-book Cavalry officer in Apache territory who's hard on his men. He's sent to pick up 40 automatic rifles and bring them back to the fort, but he runs into difficulties (of course). This is one of those very routine minor movies that Murphy kept turning up in after the end of his Universal contract. The "fort" is a one-rail corral; the soldiers are colorless, minor character actors--with one exception (see below). Distances shrink and enlarge at the whim of the plot (sometimes the action takes place a couple of days from the fort, then it's an hour's ride). The locations are overly familiar--a couple of day's shooting in Red Rock Canyon, a couple of days probably in the Owens Valley, and a couple more in rolling California hills. But--and it's a big one--Bodine, the antagonist, is played by the reliable Kenneth Tobey. As always, he gives it his all--turning this minor role into a distinct, peculiarly likable heavy. He's wry, vindictive, amusing, and--unusually for a Western where most of the good guys are former Confederates (unless the name "Quantrill" is evoked)--he fought for the South, but he's a bad guy.

This joke of a movie -- with terrible acting, a thin plot and cheap production values -- at least gave me a laugh once when I badly needed one. For some unaccountable reason, they sent us this movie about the cavalry to see when we were serving in the actual 1st Cavalry (Airmobile) in Vietnam.

These guys couldn't shoot straight, except for the few times when a single shot felled multiple Indians, but they also could not be wounded, even when taking cover behind the flimsiest rail fence.

So little thought went into this movie that it deserves to be ranked among the worst of all time. However, I gave it a second star because of the laughs.

Here's the bad news about this film. It has a ridiculous narration that keeps telling us what we don't need to be told. And the music is hit or miss, sometimes appropriate to what's being shown, and sometimes seriously off, sounding like merry go round music when major action is happening.

If those things were corrected, then the rest of the film's flaws are lesser and could have been put up with. The acting is good in some parts and with other actors not quite good enough. The story is OK and has some thrilling bits in the last half.

If you're an Audie Murphy fan, then you may want to watch this, but it's not as good as some of his earlier films.

So sad, why didn't he change over to modern action films.