Le premier rebelle

I have not seen the colorized version but it does not matter for the characters themselves are very colorful;particularly George Sanders as the "aristocratic" straight-faced phoney military man who treats the +Yankees as if they were ripe for exploitation;particularly Claire +Trevor who teamed up with Wayne in "stagecoach" and later would in ,notably ,"the high and the mighty" ,as the tomboy who wants to fight with the men who were still very macho in those troubled times. The story is routine ,and although it takes place in North America ,has a Robin Hood side ,but the actors make it a winner . The first scene when the men are asked to take off their hat is almost comedy.

The idea of placing John Wayne in the Colonies during the final years of the French-Indian War (called the "Seven Years' War" in Europe) was an inspired idea. Few films have focused on this era and it was nice to see something different. The problem was that although it was a change of locale, the film itself seemed all too much like a typical cowboy and Indian film. So much of the dialog was actually identical to stuff you'd see in films set a hundred years later--only the tribes' names were changed. As a result, the film just tended to blend into the huge pile of John Wayne westerns--and not with the great ones like the Cavalry Trilogy or THE SEARCHERS but instead the mediocre ones made in the 30s and early 40s. Claire Trevor as Wayne's main squeeze was in some ways very good (it was nice to see a less passive style of woman) but in other ways she was a 1930s gal transported to 1758! Women in that era simply did NOT run around in men's clothes, out-shoot men and insist on being treated like "one of the guys". Since I am a history teacher, I found the film frustrating and completely anachronistic. For a much better film made around the same time about Colonial America, try watching the usually overlooked HOWARDS OF VIRGINIA--a Cary Grant film better in just about every way.

John Wayne's first non-western after his breakthrough role with Stagecoach was with his Stagecoach co-star Claire Trevor and is what I would call a colonial. For myself I've always thought of westerns as films that are located west of the Mississippi and this one isn't even west of the Appalachians. Nevertheless it's a good follow-up film to Stagecoach and the first of about two dozen loan outs that Republic's Herbert J. Yates charged for the Duke's services. This one was made under the RKO banner.

Neil Swanson's novel The First Rebel was the source for this film and later on in a film based in the same post Seven Year's War American colonial period, Cecil B. DeMille would make a big budgeted spectacle of another of Swanson's novels, turning The Judas Tree into Unconquered.

RKO didn't quite put the production values of a DeMille film into Allegheny Uprising, but it still is a good action film and a plus on John Wayne's career.

What Alleghany Uprising shows are some of the seeds of the American Revolution. The Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years War which was known on the North American continent as the French and Indian War gave generous peace terms to the Indians. The British took over the French guarantees of no white settlement west of the Appalachians. That was easier said than done.

John Wayne is the leader of a group of settlers located in the Alleghany river area and he's pretty upset that trade is still permitted with the tribes. Brian Donlevy and Ian Wolfe are a pair of unscrupulous traders who are devilishly shrewd in gaining their objectives. They play British captain George Sanders like a violin, stirring him up against Wayne and the settlers. Of course the trade goods that Donlevy and Wolfe are peddling consist of rum and tomahawks.

George Sanders has the key role in this film. He really does represent the worst of the British military character. Not a bad person at heart really, but pigheaded and stubborn with not a clue as to how he's being tricked and used by Donlevy and Wolfe. Usually Sanders whether playing villains or heroes is usually someone of intelligence. This was a radical departure for him, but he carries it off.

Sanders also represents in microcosm the type that in dealing with the American colonies created the climate for the American Revolution down the road. The key scene in the film is when Wayne remarks how Sanders just refuses to understand the settlers and their ways.

Claire Trevor plays a colonial Calamity Jane, a real frontier girl who is both in love and exasperated with the Duke. A nice follow-up for her to the almost tragic Dallas in Stagecoach.

You'll see such stalwart supporting characters as Chill Wills who has a song to sing in this first film with John Wayne, Wilfrid Lawson, Eddie Quillan, Olaf Hytten, and Robert Barrat. Barrat is my favorite among the supporting cast. There's a court martial in the climax scene where the very shrewd Mr. Barrat who is the civil magistrate in the area, turns defense lawyer and with some interesting ballistic evidence turns the tables on the villains.

The Pennsylvania farmers were one independent lot. Not to be forgotten is the fact that this area in refusing to pay the tax on whiskey, precipitated the first challenge to U.S. government authority thirty years later in the Whiskey Rebellion. Of course George Washington was shrewd enough to use just the right amount of authority in dealing with the situation.

This is a decently made RKO western, made a few years before the genre became truly great (1946 - 1962), though released the same year as the first classic of the genre ("Stagecoach"). Despite some heavy-handed romantic-comedy moments, the movie moves like one of its galloping horses - at one point, Wayne is wrongly accused of murder, is put in gaol, quells an outside mob riot from inside his cell, stands trial, and is freed all within 7 minutes !

I watched this film because, after seeing THE PATRIOT (2000), I wanted to see an another perspective on the American Revolution.

The contrast is refreshing. Whereas Mel Gibson and his bunch of cut-throats often sound and act as if they had come straight out of THE TURNER DIARIES, John Wayne and his own band of irregulars live according to the principles of another gospel - that of law and order, western style. The film is indeed a western, in spite of the geographical and historical settings - the mountains of Western Pennsylvania, 15 years before the Boston Tea Party. More specifically, it is a glorified version of the typical B-movie western of the era, which often starred John Wayne, was often shot in exactly the same locations, and always featured the same formulaic story-line and motley collection of stock characters, such as the soft-spoken community leader, the wild mountaineer who talks and acts so funny, the tomboy love interest, who would like so much to be treated like a guy, but cannot, because she is *only* a girl, etc. The main difference, of course, is one of scale and production value : this is not a cheaply mid-length program filler, but a full-blown feature film in which enough talent and production value has been invested to sustain interest from the beginning to the end, even some 60 years later - and this in spite of a few dated scenes and some awkward moments of political incorrectedness (e.g. the questionable philosophical adage Çthe only friendly Indian is a dead IndianÈ is quoted approvingly).

The film, as suggested above, is based on the central classical theme of the western genre : the implementation of law and order on a wild and untamed country. In this case, however, the familiar story is told with a novel twist. The author of the screenplay has remembered that American law is, in fact, English law, but adapted to the peculiar circumstances of the new country. The pre-Revolutionary setting has provided him with an opportunity to oppose the two understandings of the same legal tradition - the new, American, understanding of English law represented by James Smith (John Wayne), a nation-builder and a free spirit who does not always play by the rules, but abides by the spirit of the law in his attempts to curb illegal liquor and arms trading with Indians, and the old, British, view, as represented by Captain Swanson (George Sanders) an upright, but unimaginative and incredibly obtuse military officer of a far-away Crown who does not seem to know of any other way to apply the law, but to the letter, regardless of common sense and consequences. In his own words : ÇI am a soldier, sir. They could have been carrying the murder of my own father if they had a permit for them. I would have defended them with my own life.È The point of the story is both that the clash between the Britain and America was inevitable and that they would eventually be reconciled because of their deep shared faith in the same ideals of justice - ultimately, it will be observed, it is the British General Gage who steps in to resolve the dispute between soldiers and colonials in a remarkably fair and even-handed manner.

We are very far from the exercise in quasi-racist British-bashing characteristic of THE PATRIOT! However, the two films have this in common that they fail to make their British villain credible. In the case of THE PATRIOT, this is due both to Robert RodatÕs script - all in black and white - and the acting, for Jason IsaacsÕ main asset, sad to say, seems to be his uncongenial face. George Sanders, on the other hand, is one of the greatest character actors specializing in villainy that Hollywood ever had. (Even his stints in BATMAN and THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. are very much worth seeing!) He had the face - and so much more : the style (ÇRemove this barbarian from the courtroom!È - Who could have said it more contemptuously?) Unfortunately, there is little that he can do to lend genuine human substance to the cardboard unidimensional character entrusted to his art. The scriptwriter seems to have meant to depict a specimen of obdurate military stupidity (British style) closely patterned on the Captain Bligh of Charles Laughton from four years earlier (MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY, Oscar for Best Picture in 1935), but, evidently, he lacked the means of his ambitions. Sanders still makes the best of the uneven material and he has his moments, most notably the scene when, besieged in his fort with his troops, Swanson orders that the soldiers who caught napping be flogged, and yet treats kindly the one man whom he actually finds sleeping on duty.