I was looking through the various streaming services' movie offerings recently, and Cinevault Westerns on the Roku Channel, a channel that shows a bunch of westerns from Columbia Pictures, had one about to start that sounded like it had a moderately interesting premise: When the Redskins Rode. So I watched it in order to be able to do a review on it here. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available on demand, and the Cinevault channels (well, pretty much anything on the Roku Channel lineup) don't put their schedule out very far in advance to find out when it's going to be on next.
First off, the movie isn't really a western in the sense that most people think of when they think of B westerns. Instead, it's set in colonial America, when "the west" meant the frontier out in what is now the eastern side of the Ohio Valley, specifically western Pennsylvania here for the most part. There's a brief expository passage telling us about the French and Indian War, and how the British and French each tried to get various Indian tribes to fight on their side, although the movie is more the lead-up to the war. The action then shifts to a wrestling competition, which is a device to introduce one of the main characters, Prince Hannoc (Jon Hall) of the Delaware tribe. He's to son of the Delaware king, Shingis (Pedro de Cordoba), and betrothed to Morna. But he's become somewhat westernized, having learned excellent English.
At that competition, he meets a young Col. George Washington (James Seay), whom you may recall from your American history lessons did in fact serve out in western Pennsylvania in the 1750s, along with Washington's adjutant/scout Gist (John Ridgely). They know that the French are trying to use the Indians to stir up trouble with the encroaching American (well, still British) settlers coming from the east, as the French would like to come south from Canada and north from Louisiana to take the whole Ohio valley. So the British would very much like it if the Delaware could get on the side of the British. But Shingiss has decided that he's going to stay neutral.
Meanwhile, the French have spies in Williamsburg, notably the lovely Elizabeth (Mary Castle), whose job is to use her sex appeal to get secrets out of the British which she can then pass to the French. So she learns that Washington and his men are going to ride west to Pennsylvania to try to stop the French advance, enabling the French to try to ambush both Washington and the Delaware. That ultimately gets the Delaware on the British side.
When the Redskins Rode is a melange of history that takes basic facts and then puts them together in ways that aren't quite right, adding a fairly ridiculous Indian romance plot into all of it. Additionally, the movie is technically way off. This is supposed to be western Pennsylvania, but all of the hills look decidedly like the parts of California that were used for B westerns of the 1950s, and totally unlike anything on this side of the Ohio River. It's as jarring as the hunting scenes in The Deer Hunter, which are supposed to be set in Pennsylvania as well, but filmed in Washington's Olympic Mountains which are much higher than anything in Pennsylvania. The movie was also filmed in a process called Super Cinecolor. Cinecolor was always an inferior process to Technicolor, but this movie is weird in that some of the scenes, especially indoor closeups, look surprisingly good for non-Technicolor color of the pre-widescreen era. Other scenes, however, look like they're on totally different film stock and terribly faded.
Still, for everything When the Redskins Rode gets wrong, it's just entertaining enough for a B "western" of the era.
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