The Outriders

I've got a couple of movies on my DVR that are coming up in quick succession on TCM, both on the calendar day of March 5, at least in the Eastern time zone. As a result, I'm doing a post on one of them a good 36 hours before it shows up on TCM. That movie is The Outriders, which is airing at part of a night of westerns that takes up the prime time lineup of March 4-5, with The Outriders itself coming on at 1:15 AM (so March 5 in the east, but still late evening March 4 in the west).

The movie has opening titles about a Camp Benton, MO, in the last year of the Civil War. Camp Benton is a prison camp for those Confederates that the Union has captured in that portion of the war theater. Or, at least, you'd think the Union might want to keep POWs away from where Quantrill's raiders were operating, but then, it hadn't really occurred to me to go down the rabbit hole of where Union prison camps were located. Anyhow, there are enough prisoners in close proximity that disease is going through the camp and apparently spreading out to the locals. So the camp commanders order the POWs into a mass bath in the nearby river.

This gives three of the POWs -- Will Owen (Joel McCrea), Jesse Wallace (Barry Sullivan), and Clint Priest (James Whitmore) -- the idea that perhaps they could try to escape. They do so by violently killing one of the Union guards (which seems like it would cause major problems with the Production Code later in the movie) but have the Union hot on their tails as they head south and west, stopping off at a farmhouse before being forced to leave again because the farmer figures out they're Confederate POWs. They continue their escape until they're confronted by a band of fighters. Except it turns out that the fighters, led by Keeley (Jeff Corey), are an offshoot of Quantrill's raiders.

When Keeley learns that Owen and company are from the South, he give them a chance to do something useful in lieu of being summarily executed as a security risk. Keeley has learned of a shipment of gold that's going from New Mexico to Saint Louis. That gold could be highly useful to the Confederacy if somebody could capture the wagon train and abscond with the gold to take it to Richmond. Perhaps Owen and the others could fall in with the wagon train and "guide" it to an area where Keeley and his men can ambush it. Since they don't have much choice, and do after all support the South, Owen and the other two head off to New Mexico.

The Wagon train is being headed by Don Antonio Chaves (Ramon Novarro) and accompanied by a bunch of relatively inconsequential crew but also a priest and the widow Gort (Arlene Dahl) and her adolescent brother-in-law Roy (Claude Jarman Jr.). Chaves doesn't want to hire Owen at first because he's already got enough men, but when Owen sees an Indian attack about to happen, he's able to foil it in a way that gets Chaves to accept him.

Now, here the movie has a bit of a dilemma. Joel McCrea as Owen is the male lead, and he's not shown himself to be a mean enough bad guy that he's obviously going to get his comeuppance. Yet the Production Code (and the historicity of the South having lost the Civil War, of course) demands that the robbery plot not be successful. How to deal with that? Well, part of it has to do with Owen getting to know the Gorts and that starting to play on him emotionally. But there's also the deft plot point of the movie being set at just the right time that news of Lee's surrender reaches the wagon train just before the point at which th ambush is set to happen. Owen can plausibly say he's no longer at war and switch sides. Of course, Keeley is still out there, and there are Owen's two companions....

The Outriders is actually not a bad movie, despite my comments in the above paragraphs giving the suggestion that I'd have Production Code-inspired problems with the resolution. It does what it does well enough, although it was released in 1950, a few years before westerns began to get more psychologically complex, so it feels like a rather simplistic film at times. Having been made at MGM I think doesn't help in that regard, although it does have good production values and nice Technicolor cinematography.

If you want another movie where you can just sit back and be entertained, and you're up for a western, you could do a lot worse than The Outriders.