Panique sauvage au far-west

A typical action packed western of the period with so much action that nobody has time to develop any characters. Yes there are plenty of guns and fistfights and a feisty diminutive heroine in Gale Storm, the tomboy who acts as the love interest and gets a spanking on the way for kicking a cowboy's shin. All right and proper for the period but frowned upon now, of course. A film that will amuse if you like that sort of thing.

This movie may be memorable for being Blake Edwards' second movie script, but it remains a B western with a good budget, one of Allied Artists' efforts to lift itself out of the shrinking market for Saturday morning kiddie fare. It does so by some adult themes and a bit of depth in its character study, as cattle rancher Rod Cameron denies water to the nesters coming onto the range, despite the obvious attraction he and Gale Storm have for each other.

It's also visually darker than most B westerns, with the darkness lurking around the edge of the frame as people ride their horses, and in several still compositions shot, apparently, in dense forest. Everyone tries to make this a more important movie than it winds up being by techniques adopted from other film genres, but Rod Cameron's simple, muscular line readings defeat the effort.

Big budget Allied Artists western 'spectacular' has two really interesting moments: THE ALLIED ARTISTS LOGO done in a TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX style which is a very effective copy; and the big Stampede itself where hundreds of mad cows steer their way over a cliff. Maybe AA borrowed the Lydeckers from Republic or maybe they hopped over the studio fence to help out after hours, because it is a very well created scene in miniature that is quite convincing. From memory it is in a lightning storm...not a Gale Storm but a real studio storm. Gale Storm IS in this film, fresh from the Monogram musical blockbuster SUNBONNET SUE and perhaps some campus hi-jinks with Elyse Knox in another University set swing programmer (usually with Frankie Darro and Manton Moreland)....but I digress. STAMPEDE is a romantic western drama made with an attempt to showcase ALLIED ARTISTS as an arm of MONOGRAM that delivers bigger budget pix for the new age of 'competing with television' in the USA of 1949. Written by Blake Edwards!

Rod Cameron plays iron-willed Mike McCall, an 1880s Arizona cattleman marked for death by corrupt land developers and victimized by their villainous scheme to stir up a rampage that sends McCall's panicked herd pounding across the range and toppling helplessly over a high cliff...

Stampede is a standard settlers vs ranchers story, though the real villain is Stanton, a land developer, but as expected there's some gunplay, fistfights and a stampede (Of course) to keep things interesting. It's well-paced, has some snappy dialogue, and a killer action scene in the barn which is an eye opener- two guys jump Rod Cameron and there's some edgy fist fight, then gunplay and some fist fighting in the loft. Phew!

Big budget is a relative term and while Stampede wouldn't pass muster as a B film at MGM, Paramount etc. it's a good and grim western from Allied Artists. It's a cut rate version with the same issues about ranchers and homesteaders that MGM's Sea Of Grass or Paramount's Shane have. In a far more humorous vein John Wayne's McLintock explores the same issues.

Rod Cameron certainly sits as tall in the saddle as the Duke did. Unlike John Wayne, Cameron never escaped B pictures. He's the local McLintock in Stampede who built himself a nice cattle empire with his more easy going brother Don Castle. He's also built himself a dam and settlers who've bought parcels of land now have no water.

There seems to be a lot of personal animus directed at Cameron by villains John Eldredge and John Miljan for no discernible reason other than jealousy. They seem to want to bring him down just on general principles. Among the settlers that Miljan and Eldredge bring are Steve Clark and his daughter Gale Storm.

Cameron may never have cracked the A picture market as a star. But Stampede is a fine B western and the climax is the title.