Devil's Doorway-1950-Antho ny Mann's first western please read details

This is a DVR rip.Real good quality.Very rare.



"The film marked an important turning point in the growth of the Hollywood Western, as one that offers not only action but ideas."



Perhaps it is too late now to change the course of fiction which has established the American Indian as a ruthless savage, but our movie makers appear to be endeavoring to right some of the wrong they themselves have done the red man over the years. In "Devil's Doorway," which Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer put on the screen of the Capitol yesterday, the prejudices and covetousness of certain of the pioneers who settled the West is dramatized in terms that leaves a bitter taste. But while Guy Trosper has written a story which calls the turn on the white man's disregard of the Indian's right to life and the pursuit of happiness, "Devil's Doorway" is no preachment. It is a whopping action film when the script gets up to the point where the Indians determine to make a stand against encroaching homesteaders.



Anthony Mann, the director, has arranged a long and explosive battle in which the Indians charge down out of the hills, toss sticks of dynamite into the covered wagons and leap wildly from their horses onto the backs of the pioneers. It is a swirling, surging battle, full of gunfire and convulsive eruptions of earth, punctuated by the shrill bleatings of hundreds of sheep caught in the struggle. Indians never fought more skillfully than they do in "Devil's Doorway" under the leadership of Lance Poole, a noble Shoshone who—it says here—received the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery at Gettysburg while a sergeant in the Third Pennsylvania Cavalry.



All Lance wants out of life is to live peaceably and raise cattle on his Sweet Meadows, a vast area of rich grazing lands outside Medicine Bow, Wyo. But his fertile fields are like a magnet to a group of desperate sheep raisers who have driven their flocks down from the sun-scorched meadows of Nebraska. The sheep men are represented as decent people who are misled and turned against the Indians by an unscrupulous lawyer. Although the author resorts to this standard compromise to excuse the settlers' usurpation of the Indians land, the film does speak out against the red man's sad plight as a mistreated ward of the Government.



"Devil's Doorway," like the Twentieth Century-Fox picture of a few months back, "Broken Arrow," is a Western with a point of view that rattles some skeletons in our family closet. Robert Taylor may strike you as a rather peculiar choice to play a full-blooded Indian, but give the man credit for a forceful performance. Indeed, his is the only role that is not a stereotype. However, the other players give good performances even though they represent characters that are as much a part of the Western film formula as horses and sagebrush. List among them, Louis Calhern as the Indian-hating lawyer; Edgar Buchanan as the marshal; Marshall Thompson as a young sheepherder and Paula Raymond as an attractive Borgia who tries in vain to help out the Indians and maintain the peace.



Tommy Dorsey and orchestra head the in-person show at the Capitol which also features Rory Calhoun and Lita Baron; Jackie Gleason and Serge Flash, the juggler.





At the Capitol

DEVIL'S DOORWAY, based on a screenplay by Guy Trosper; directed by Anthony Mann; produced by Nicholas Nayfack for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Lance Poole . . . . . Robert Taylor

Verne Coolan . . . . . Louis Calhern

Orrie Masters . . . . . Paula Raymond

Rod MacDougall . . . . . Marshall Thompson

Red Rock . . . . . James Mitchell

Zeke Carmody . . . . . Edgar Buchanan

Scotty MacDougall . . . . . Rhys Williams

Mrs. Masters . . . . . Spring Byington

Ike Stapleton . . . . . James Millican

Lieut. Grimes . . . . . Bruce Cowling

Mr. Poole . . . . . Fritz Leiber

Dr. C. O. MacQuillan . . . . . Harry Antrim

Thundercloud . . . . . Chief John Big Tree



Just how "noir" can a western really be? How's this for a start: a movie that was helmed by the director most commonly associated with the influence of noir on '50s westerns, having made the transition himself from noir in the late '40s to westerns in the '50s. And this same movie marked the last of the multiple collaborations between that director and one of the most legendary noir cinematographers, in the only western they ever made together.



Devil's Doorway was the first western directed by Anthony Mann, according to Jeff Stafford's TCM article about the film. Apparently it was held back from release until the success of Delmer Daves' Broken Arrow convinced MGM's executives that their Mann-helmed western might not be sunk by its sympathetic portrayal of a Native American as the protagonist. Mann had already achieved some strikingly dark outdoor imagery in his penultimate collaboration with John Alton, Border Incident, and Devil's Doorway is marked by their application of many of those techniques to the rocky landscapes and naturally lit interiors of the old west.



With this upload I now have all Mann's westerns