Les Téméraires

As an avid western watcher for over 60 years. I recently watched , The Raiders,for the 15th time. It still remains one of the, should have and probably was, made with the television watching audience in mind type movies. Boring and predictable, it puts me to sleep every single time I attempt to watch it.

As another reviewer has pointed out, "The Raiders" is a movie which takes what might be called a broadly neo-Confederate position about the years following the American Civil War. This position, which has been called the "Myth of the Lost Cause", holds that the Confederate cause during the Civil War was a just one, that the war had little if anything to do with slavery and was instead a "war of Northern aggression" which ended in the supposed injustices imposed on the defeated Southerners during the Reconstruction Era.

The main characters are a group of Texas ranchers, left financially destitute by the war. To avoid being exploited by corrupt Northern carpetbaggers, they attempt to drive their herds from Texas to the nearest rail-head in Kansas, but lose their cattle to attacks by bandits and hostile Indians. Despite having no cattle to sell, they ride on to Kansas where they demand that the Kansas and Pacific Railroad build a new railway line into Texas. When the railroad management refuse to comply with their demand, they (all seven of them!) form themselves into a guerrilla army to fight the railroad and prevent its westward expansion into Colorado. Despite the illegal nature of their activities, which today would probably be characterised as terrorism, the ranchers are presented as the heroes of the film, and the US Army officer (a Northerner, of course) who tries to stop them as the villain.

The film also features three legendary figures of the Old West- Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill Cody- shown as taking part in adventures very different from anything they did in real life. A similar device, using the same three characters, along with a fourth, General Custer, was used in Cecil B de Mille's "The Westerner". Hickok is here normally referred to as "Jim", probably to distinguish between himself and Buffalo Bill. (Hickok's real name was James, but he was normally known by his nickname Wild Bill). The real Calamity Jane would only have been a teenager at the time of the events shown here, but the character played by Judi Meredith, who would have been 27 in 1963, is rather older. She wears tight leather trousers, in a style more that of the 1960s and 1860s. The makers of Westerns occasionally tried to make them sexier by dressing attractive young female characters in twentieth-century fashions which no nineteenth-century woman would have worn. (Think of Marilyn Monroe's equally tight jeans in "River of No Return").

This is a film with little going for it, quite apart from its objectionable political stance. The acting and the script are undistinguished. The ranchers' demand- that a publicly funded railroad should, on their say-so, divert its finances into the construction of an unauthorised branch line several hundred miles long- is both unrealistic and unreasonable, something the film-makers blatantly overlook. They also overlook the ridiculous nature of the idea that seven, mostly elderly, men- the most unlikely guerrilla army since Citizen Smith's Tooting Popular Front- could present any sort of serious threat to American military power. A plot like this one could, just about, have served as the basis for a comedy spoof Western like "Blazing Saddles". That the film-makers used it as the basis of a supposedly serious movie defies belief. 3/10.

Ex-Confederate Texan Brian Keith and some fellow ranchers, fed up with the low prices offered by carpetbaggers, drive their cattle up north to sell to the Army. They encounter a sympathetic Buffalo Bill Cody (Robert Culp) and Calamity Jane (Judi Meredith) and obstacles.

It's a theatrical movie, but it's lit and has a score like a TV western: bright colors like a 1960s Louis Lamour paperback, and intrusive music that tells you precisely how you're supposed to feel at any moment. The script by Gene L. Coon is sympathetic to the Texans; Coon is, of course, best remembered as one of the producers of the Original STAR TREK, which was pitched as "WAGON TRAIN in space"; Coon also wrote several episodes of the Western series.

Keith mumbles a lot of his line. He did that a lot.

I recently saw this film for the first time on TV. It starts out OK but later turns into a joke.

The first part of the movie deals with the Brian Keith character's fight to help Texas recover following the Civil War. This includes battling with the carpet baggers and organizing the ranchers to move their cattle to the nearest railhead, which happens to be in Kansas. The drive fails so Keith decides to go to Kansas to persuade the railroad to run a line into Texas.

Fine up to this point, but then the picture turns ludicrous. Along comes Wild Bill Hickok (a woefully miscast Robert Culp), Young Buffalo Bill (Jim McMullen) and Calamity Jane (Judi Meredith). Why these characters were introduced into the story is beyond me. They add nothing and serve as not much more than comic relief. The Plainsman (1936) explored this concept much better.

The conflict between Keith and the army (led by an effective Albert Ryder), could have been developed without the aforementioned three characters. Good character actors like Warner Anderson, Harry Carey Jr., Richard Deacon and Trevor Bardette are wasted. Possibly some of their scenes were cut as the film only runs 75 minutes.

They should have built the story around the opening scenes. That would have resulted in a much better movie.

Holly-molly!!! I wouldn't write a review for this flop of a movie except that I noticed that 12 people actually rated this a 10. A 10! What caliber of people write these things?

I turned in on have way through (thank goodness I didn't waste any more time on it) took one look at the costuming and couldn't believe some director thought this depicted the old west. Oh my gosh, how bad can you get. There would be more realistic costumes at my daughter's 6th grade school play. Who ever made this movie should be so embarrassed. And shame on the actors who agreed to "act" in this turkey. I rated it as a 1 because I didn't see a 0 as an option. The only thing this this film did for me was give me the opportunity to rate this the lowest I have ever rated an movie. It's just so bad.