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The Worst Film Ever

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

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

Flaming Feather casts Sterling Hayden as a rancher and Forrest Tucker as a cavalry lieutenant who make a bet as to who will catch the notorious outlaw known as the Sidewinder. Hayden whose ranch was recently burned out and cattle stolen is not satisfied with the performance of the army in catching this desperado. The Sidewinder has as his gang a collection renegade Ute Indians which makes him the army business as opposed to civilian law enforcement. Hayden and Tucker have a wager on who will catch him first as no white people know his identity.It wasn't hard to figure it out just look at the casting. Even without IMDb identifying the Sidewinder on Flaming Feather's page it was easy to figure out by the kind of roles this player is usually cast in. The real suspense is whether Hayden or Tucker will wind up with leading ladies Arleen Whelan and Barbara Rush. Another good part is that of Carol Thurston who played many exotic types in her career and is the Indian mistress of The Sidewinder.Flaming Feather is good, but highly predictable.

This a good picture for what it is. It seems to start out as a formula western with an age old plot, white man running with Indians doing bad things, lone hero sets out to stop him, etc. However the script is pretty good, there is some suspense, though we sort of know from the get-go who the bad guy is,the moment he shows on the screen. I love Sterling Hayden...for a guy who really didn't like being an actor, he does all right. Barbara Rush is beautiful and appealing. Forrest Tucker just shows up, and Victory Jory steals the picture with his oily charm.Edgar Buchannian is wasted in a role he really isn't suited for.However, all in all, a pretty good picture. I enjoyed it.

At one time the IMDb cast list did rather spoil things by telling us who the Sidewinder is, but since I wrote this review some years ago it seems to have been amended. So I'm altering what I wrote then.There are several possibilities about who the Sidewinder is, and I had my own suspicions (which eventually proved to be correct) as soon as he appeared. Sterling Hayden was his usual wooden self in the lead role, Forrest Tucker was sufficiently rugged as the army officer, but Edgar Buchanan made an unconvincing sergeant - almost as much so as Andy Devine in "Two Rode Together".In the opening shoot-out at his ranch, Tex seems to have a revolver that never needs reloading; I counted 17 successive shots, though six of these were fired when he was sheltering in the cattle pen; arguably he could have reloaded out of camera, but he then gallops off, firing another 11! And when the stagecoach leaves town it's picturesquely filmed from under a distinctive tree - which features again later in the coach journey after Tex has done his rescue act.The film is redeemed by a good closing fight between the whites and the Utes, with an unusual setting for the inevitable concluding fisticuffs.

This is strange and enjoyable, an odd mix of straight genre and novel plot.Superficially, it is a genre western in all its component parts:Army, including a rough and tumble, betting, chewing sarge. A redheaded owner of a bar, essentially that abstraction of a whore that only exists in movieland. A more beautiful "innocent" woman, goodhearted. A lone rancher on a mission of revenge. A gang of thieving, murdering Indians, led by an evil mastermind. A solidly honest gambler. Color. Traditional score.And most of the action is of the ordinary kind: barroom fights, barroom singing (in the Red Feather, where our redhead works -- guess that's where the title comes from). And there's the cowboy rescuing the pert damsel again and again. He ends up with her after thwarting her wedding to the unrecognized bad guy. (who she doesn't know killed her parents).But this has some twists that actually make it interesting, enough unpredictable that you may find it interesting.The shootout at the end involves ladders and dimension, rare for a picture of this era. But the big deal for me: the setup for the first three quarters of the movie is that the redhead and the guy who turns out to be the mysterious "sidewinder" have a big quarrel. We expect to learn that she is his wife or sister. Or that she is the sidewinder. We expect that the bad guy will die, but that the tart with a heart will survive. That's the west, right?No. The whole thing leads up to a massive shootout which just happens to involve her and a group of men who mysteriously would follow her into such a thing. No problem, we think, her hidden power and role will be uncovered in some way.Nope. An errant bullet in the shootout -- not even from anyone important -- fells her. She dies. We never learn the puzzle that has captured us throughout. We've been tricked by the shape of the thing, which so clearly is a genre movie, but at the end, no genre ending?What a thrill.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching