Untamed Frontier

For those of you who have the StarzEncore pagkage of movies, you have a chance to catch Untamed Frontier tomorrow morning at 6:19 AM.

Joseph Cotten plays Kirk Denbow, one member of a family who owns a whole bunch of land in the Arizona territory. However, there's also a bunch of land owned by the federal government, and under the Homestead Act they intend to parcel that land out to settlers. The problem is, the land is surrounded on all American sides by the Denbows' land. They use their own land and the Federal land to graze their cattle, and they're not about to give any settlers right-of-way across the Denbow land to settle since it would ultimately mean the loss of free grazing land that the Denbows are using.

Kirk is the most pragmatic member of the family. He's got a cousin in Glenn (Scott Brady) who is much more of a hothead. Indeed, he's currently in town raising a ruckus as well as seeing his girlfriend Jane (Shelley Winters), who, while she loves him, also has sympathy for the settlers. Eventually, Glenn gets in a gunfight with somebody who, it turns out, is not armed, so the legal system is going to come after him, and by association the Denbows.

Matt Denbow (Minor Watson), patriarch of the family, comes up with the idea to spirit Jane away to Texas since she's the one witness who could convict Glenn. She's too honest to do that. So Matt and Glenn come up with another idea, which is to have Glenn marry Jane! That way she'll be his wife and can't be forced to testify against Glenn. (Couldn't she choose to testify?) Since she does like Glenn, she marries him and starts living at the ranch.

She soon realizes the mistake she made. Glenn has another girlfriend in Lottie (Suzan Ball), and Jane starts becoming friends with Kirk. Meanwhile, the settlers are massing for an invasion of the strip of land they'd have to cross to get to the federal land....

Universal made a whole bunch of programmer westerns in the 1950s, of which this is one. They're short (Untamed Frontier clocks in at 78 minutes) and capably produced if nothing spectacular. Untamed Frontier fits in perfectly in that mold. Everybody does an adequate job, but the story feels as though it could be interchangeable with the cast of whatever other western was being produced at the time. You'll likely be entertained, but it won't linger in your memory like the great westerns.

Untamed Frontier does not seem ever to have gotten a DVD release in the US, so you're going to have to catch the rare cable showing.