Watch The Siege at Red River For Free

That was an excellent one.

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Blistering performances.

Van Johnson plays a charming as well as well-appareled Confederate officer working undercover alongside Milburn Stone out the west in director Rudolph Maté's Civil War western "Siege at Red River," co-starring future Spaghetti western star Craig Hill and an up-and-coming Richard Boone. The dusty, Technicolor action unfolds in 1864 with Captain James S. Simmons, aka Jim Farraday (Van Johnson) stealing a Gatling Gun. Farraday and his partner Sgt. Benjamin 'Benjy' Guderman (Milburn Stone of "Gunsmoke") work their way from one frontier town to another singing a code song and selling snake oil medicine. Eventually, they come across a Union nurse, Nora Curtis (Joanne Dru) and caravan with her. Meantime, Pinkerton sleuth Frank Kelso (Jeff Morrow) suspects that Farraday, who claims to be a conscientious objector from Boston who paid $300 for a substitute to take his place to the war, is too good to be a true. Farraday's treacherous cohort Brett Manning (Richard Boone), a whip wielding dastard, steals the Gatling Gun and sells it to the Indians. The Civil War concludes about the same time that the Indians launch an attack on a cavalry foot with Manning operating the Gatling Gun for them. The scenery is certainly spectacular, and it appears that the filmmakers are poaching on John Ford country. This standard-issue oater won't raise any brows, but it qualifies as a pleasant way to burn time.

I was not really concentrating on this film (on Film4), as I was reading the Sunday newspaper. However, I found my attention being more and more drawn to a plot that seemed to get more believable as it progressed. Characters were developed to the point where strangeness of behaviour became them. The lack of outright violence was a huge plus in such a story, that might easily have descended into a straight-forward gunfight. Period settings overcame obvious rigours of budget to a degree of acceptability. Though all aspects - dialogue, scenery, plot etc. - all fell short at some point, the overall effect was of a well-constructed and written movie into which a great deal of thoughtful direction had been lavished.

In 1954, a Western about the Civil War is not just about the Civil War. 'Siege at Red River' opens with the robbery of a Union train by a bunch of outlaws. The Union soldiers, including a detective, combine the Military and the Law - they are protecting a secret new super-weapon - the Gatling Gun, the first example of mechanised warfare which means surefire victory for which ever side possesses it. If we substitute the Gatling with a nuclear warhead, the Civil War with the Cold War; and if we note that the bandits make off in a red mail van, and that their leader wears a red cravat, and we assume them as commies, than the Western becomes an Allegory. This is not surprising - from its inception the genre has celebrated the UNITED States and played out and resolved its crises, while the likes of President Reagan have used it to signify a sense of genuine Americanness, so it is natural the genre should be marshalled in such a time of perceived crisis.As the film is directed by the great Rudolph Mate, former cinematographer for, among others, Carl Dreyer, one of the genuine maestros of the cinema, we might assume that if his film is a Cold War Allegory, it will be far from simplistic. The linking of Communism with disruption, criminality, secrecy and murder is not a surprise; if we do make the link, when our first shock is that the bandit leader is played by the film's star. The benefits of the star persona - wit, charm, a (relatively) rounded personality (he is a grim avenger and gun smuggler, but also a musician, orator and gentleman; he is connected with role-play and the theatre) are in contrast with the monolithic forces of law and order; while he has multiple interests besides the war, they have only that defining interest. Further, while his motives are essentially decent and right-minded, the 'good' guys are not only street-bawling thugs, but perpetrators of vile, near-genocidal acts. The film doesn't go so far as to salvage Farraday's oppositional position - the conflict between North and South is on one level displaced on gender, where it can be resolved in romance; and on another, generic level, displaced on a third enemy - the murderous amoral smuggler and the Indians - so the opposing American forces can finally reconcile. But it's not a happy reconciliation - the massacre of the Indians is only cathartic if we ignore that they too, like the Americans in the Fort, have women and children; and the finale is only happy if we accept the couple's words, and not the narrative reality, that he is an outlaw evading justice and leaving the woman he has learned to love. This fact of separation from the site of reconciliation implicitly questions that reconciliation. There are other features - the anti-realistic use of colour; the drunk scene, where the dominant male point of view suddenly switches to the drunken, gun-shooting female, linked to her frank, disruptive, transformative sexuality and contrasted with the ship-lashing, neurotic villain; the use of song, espeically 'Tapioca', and its movement from rebel code to music hall; the argument that nation is an arbitrary series of signs - the Indians shoot first at the US flag, not the army; the image of the Niagara Falls on the music hall curtains - where national identity is constructed and negotiated, not 'natural'; a sophisticated attitude to patriotism, war and friendship - that all add up to a more thoughtful Western than its routine reputation might suggest.

Johnson as a cavalry captain trying to stop the delivery of Gatling Guns to hostile Indians. Boone, of course stands out as the heavy, in this otherwise below par oater.