Watch Fighting Caravans For Free

Redundant and unnecessary.

Fantastic!

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Quick and amusing dialogue, fun characters, great location shooting, and high production values for the time, I was very happy to stumble upon this wonderful old film. I found it thoroughly entertaining.Seeing the charismatic glow of a skinny young Gary Cooper makes me regret that he adopted such a dull and wooden persona later in his career.A lot of the negative critiques of this film here seem to be based on superficial criticisms of the look and pacing of movies of this era, and not with the movie itself. If a movie is engaging, one soon gets used to the shortcomings of the time when early talkies were still finding their way with dialogue delivery and pacing. In fact, I thought they did a pretty good job here. While it is somewhat episodic, the performances are sensitive, and it does give us a rich and convincing glimpse of the wagon train era, even with the white man's simplistic perspective of Native American culture.

The main flaw to this movie is Gary Cooper. He was a great actor, but in this film appears to be in a not-yet-mature stage in his career. Cooper plays a lanky happy-go-lucky cowboy, who can turn the wrong direction or the right direction at this point in his young life. The heroine is a tough woman, but who still has a woman's heart. She can be very tough, but still expects to be treated right by a man. Instead of seeing what a great wife and partner for life she would be, Cooper's character struggles with many dilemmas before choosing this path. The best characters in the film are two older men, who are scouts. They are a dying breed and the coming of the railroad threatens to destroy their livelihoods. They are very selfish and want to keep their young apprentice (Cooper) under their wings. They try everything to destroy the budding romance between the hero and heroine. In the end, they realize that they have been fools, and decide that supporting the romance is after all the best solution. I liked the fact that the Native Americans were portrayed with some sensitivity. This was 1931. The main bad guy was white. While continuing some of the stereotypes about Native Americans - that they are brutal, the movie was at least light-hearted and comical, rather than pursuing an agenda of hatred towards the Native Americans. The ending was nice. Everybody finds love. Even an older man finds a Native American bride.

The Gary Cooper of "Fighting Caravans" is certainly not the Gary Cooper of "High Noon", nor is his future star quality evident here. In this film, Cooper is as green and naive as the Clint Belmet character he portrays. To avoid arrest on a trumped up charge, he poses as an intended groom for French lovely Felice (Lily Damita), who is intent on finding passage to California on a wagon train from Independence, Missouri to Sacramento. Clint has been trained in the ways of frontier life by two grizzled veterans, Bridger and Jackson, and they don't exactly cotton to the budding romance they see unfolding - "Here's hopin' she finds a husband somewhere's else".Based on a Zane Grey novel and set right in the middle of the Civil War, the film moves unevenly from it's unlikely premise, to a temporary stop at an Army fort while it's troop marches on to Vicksburg to hook up with General Grant. Throughout it's dangerous journey in the middle of hostile Indian territory, Cooper proves his worth and finally wins his lady's heart by rescuing her from a runaway wagon. See it both for Gary Cooper's early starring performance and for it's early Western treatment in the relatively new "talkie" format, but don't expect an epic.

The story is stunningly trite, which is not unusual for Zane Gray novels. Two hard-drinking, grizzled scouts, big Scots-accented Bill Jackson and squirrelly little Jim Bridger have raised a handsome young orphan scout Clint Belmet. They conspire to get him out of some sort of trouble in Independence, Kansas, by convincing a pretty young French woman, Felice, to pretend to be Clint's wife. She is setting out across the country with a wagon train to supply the California settlement, and the scouts go along, and pretty soon there's a romance, which Jackson & Bridger loathe and try to foil. Clint nothing more than a giant boy. The caravan is menaced by a war band of Plains Indians, egged on by an evil turncoat white man. The photography is sometimes nice, and the character actors chew the scenery admirably. Gary Cooper is very handsome, and his face more expressive than in some later films, and Lily Damita at times is quite lovely. The story depends on several stupid premises: Clint must grow up and settle down, because the old west is finished (especially when his two mentors die), and after a while he accepts it. Worse yet, the assumptions made by the story and especially the summary titles all rest grotesquely on the doctrine of manifest destiny, which renders Indians savage killers struggling futilely against inevitable progress, and the "pioneers" are heroes, of course. Still, the movie is worth seeing as a curiosity, a slightly embarrassing statement of the values of the 30s.