Rocky Mountain

Errol Flynn is this month's Star of the Month on TCM, and I've recorded several of his lesser movies aleady. Having that many of his movies on the DVR, I decided to watch one to do a review on, and picked Rocky Mountain.

The movie starts off in the present day, with a car driving through the California mountains where they stop at a plaque informing us that they're at Rocky Mountain/Ghost Mountain, where a little-known chapter of the Civil War took place in the closing days of the war. It should be fairly obvious that we're about to flash back to those days at the end of March 1865....

Lafe Barstow (Errol Flynn) is a captain in the Confederate Army. Robert E. Lee knows that there's virtually no shot of winning the war any more, do he's decided one one desperate gamble. There's a man out in California named Cole Smith who has some ability to gather men, and apparently some Confederate sympathies, so if those men could attack the forts in California, it would divert valuable resources from the Eastern front. The job of Barstow and his men are to find Cole and get him to get those men.

Unfortunately, Barstow's crew are interrupted in that mission when they see the area's Indians attacking a stagecoach. Barstow does the human thing, and saves whom he can from the stagecoach, which is the drive and a female passenger, Johanna Carter (Patrice Wymore). She's traveling alone, something not normal for women to do back in those days, because she's on her way to the fort where her fiancé, Lt. Rickey of the Union Army (Scott Forbes) is waiting for her. Unsurprisingly, some of Barstow's men are going to have inappropriate thoughts about Johanna along the way, leading to some conflict.

Since the stagecoach doesn't show up at the Union fort, the Union sends out a detachment to find it, and Barstow and his men ambush that, too, getting several more prisoners, including Lt. Rickey himself. But there's a complication, which is that the Indians have seen what happened, and figured out where Barstow and his men are. They'll be able to surround Barstow's group and slaughter them, so Barstow is going to have to figure out a way to escape. Also, they've already met Cole Smith, who was going by a false name. Still, Barstow sends Smith off to try to get those men, which if he's successful could lead to having enough men to take on the Indians.

Rocky Mountain was apparently the last western in Errol Flynn's career, and the one that introduced Flynn to his final wife (Wymore), but it's not otherwise a particularly important movie or much more than a programmer. It was only given black-and-white treatment, and a couple of the scenes are actually pretty murky. The script is serviceable, and Flynn does a more than professional job, as do the supporting stars. So as a result Rocky Mountain is definitely worth a watch even though there's nothing special or new going on here.