netwallah Review of Fighting Caravans

Fighting Caravans (1931)

Western clichés, manifest destiny, some good photography

[17 May 2004]

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.