By Fred Blosser
Every career starts somewhere. In 1948, Rock Hudson’s began
under contract at Universal International Pictures with bit roles like “second
lieutenant” and “detective.” By
1953, thanks to his good looks, ambition, an influential agent, and shrewd
beefcake publicity, he progressed to star billing in the studio’s assembly line
of budget-conscious but colorful Westerns and costume adventures. By and large those productions
are little remembered today, but they served two immediate purposes as they
were designed to do. For
Universal International, they made modest profits in movie theatres where weary
working-class families flocked on weekends for splashy Technicolor
entertainment. For
Hudson, a novice actor, they provided valuable on-the-job training and popular
visibility—prerequisites for better paying, more prestigious film credits to
come.
Three of those
journeyman films were “Seminole,” “The Golden Blade,” and “Bengal Brigade,”
available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber Studio Classics, in a boxed set as a
“Rock Hudson Collection.” If
you’re a younger viewer who wonders what Grandma and Grandad did for movie
escapism before Marvel Comics and Tom Cruise, these will give you a good idea. Viewers with the time and
stamina may decide to watch the entire set in one binge sitting of 255 minutes. If so, one thing will become
apparent. Even spread
across three genres, the storylines and casts don’t differ much. In the studio system of the
early Eisenhower years, Universal International could make its B-movies quickly
and cheaply by rushing its contract players like Hudson from one backlot set to
another in formulaic scripts.
In “Seminole” (1953),
the actor stars as Second Lt. Lance Caldwell, an Army officer who hopes to
avert a war with the Seminole Indians of 1835 Florida. But his superior officer,
Major Degan (Richard Carlson, effectively cast against type as a bristly
martinet), has other ideas. When
Degan and Caldwell lead an expedition into the swamp to confront the Indians,
the troop is ambushed. Captured,
Lance finds that the Seminoles have their own split between pacifists and
war-mongers. Lance’s
friend, Chief Osceola (Anthony Quinn), wants to sign a treaty even if it means
uprooting the tribe. An
influential warrior, Kajeck (Hugh O’Brian), won’t settle for anything less than
armed victory over Degan and his troops. With the Army routed, the
territory’s white settlers will clear out fast.
Like most 1950s
Westerns, the plot is generic. Except
for the Everglades setting, the Seminole might as well be Apache, Cheyenne, or
Sioux, played by white actors in body paint. Indian wars are the fault of
hot-heads on both sides, not the result of orchestrated land-grabs by the U.S.
government as was usually the case in real life. The swamps are a combination
of on-location footage in the Everglades and a backlot set where Hudson
dutifully slogs through bogs and creeks with supporting players James Best,
Russell Johnson, and another actor who started small and ended big, Lee Marvin. Those scenes give director
Budd Boetticher and his cast a chance to flex some macho muscle, even though
the studio swamp looks about as sweltering and nasty as a Magic Kingdom theme
park. Hudson and
Boetticher would go on to better Westerns, Hudson with Robert Aldrich’s “The
Last Sunset” and Boetticher in five iconic pictures with Randolph Scott.
“The Golden Blade”
(1953) puts Hudson in familiar Arabian Nights
surroundings as
Haroun, a merchant’s son from Basra who travels to Baghdad to avenge his
father’s death in an attack by bandits. In fact, the “bandits” were
assassins secretly dispatched by Jafar (George Macready), the caliph’s scheming
vizier, to provoke a war between the two cities. This is part of a scheme by
Jafar that also includes promoting a marriage between his loutish son Haji
(Gene Evans), the captain of the palace guard, and Princess Khairuzan (Piper
Laurie). Once Haji
becomes regent, agents from “Basra” will murder the caliph and the princess,
and Haji will inherit the throne as Jafar’s puppet. Haroun is under-matched
against Haji, the greatest swordsman in Baghdad, until he finds a magic sword
in the medieval Baghdad equivalent of a Goodwill thrift shop.
Given that Piper
Laurie had recently made two almost identical films with Tony Curtis, “The
Prince Who Was a Thief” (1951) and “Son of Ali Baba” (1952), “The Golden Blade”
was already familiar material by 1953. Some scenes were lifted from an even earlier Universal production,
1944’s “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” a common cost-saving tactic by the
studio in the early 1950s. Minus
the sword fights, there isn’t a lot of difference, either, between “The Golden
Blade” and your eight-year-old's favourite, “Disney’s Aladdin”; even the
villainous viziers in both movies are named Jafar. It’s easy to make fun of
old-fashioned B-level swashbucklers like this, but the director, Nathan Juran,
mounts the action scenes well, and the Technicolor reds, greens, purples, and
blues are sumptuous in their hi-def clarity. Casting Gene Evans as the
secondary bad guy may seem like an odd call, since most of us fondly remember
the veteran character actor for scores of Westerns and war dramas, but Evans’
bullish persona gives the character a knowingly humorous edge. When Piper Laurie’s spirited
princess complains, “Men are able to roam freely, while we women are trapped in
the harem,” the harried housewives of 1953 probably agreed.
Hudson landed the
starring role in “Bengal Brigade” (1954) after Tyrone Power turned down the
part; Power had already played a similar character in 20th Century Fox’s “King of
the Khyber Rifles.” At a
siege of a rebellious native fort in 1856 India, British Captain Jeffrey
Claybourne disobeys an order by Colonel Morrow (Torin Thatcher) to retreat
under heavy fire, attacking instead. Claybourne’s company of native Indian soldiers had walked into an
ambush, and the captain’s action saves their lives at the cost of his military
career and his engagement to the colonel’s daughter (Arlene Dahl). Claybourne resigns and knocks
around India as a big-game hunter (on a jungle set likely repurposed from the
swamp in “Seminole”), when he’s approached by a devious Indian rajah (Arnold
Moss). The rajah is
gathering a private army for an uprising against the British, and he offers the
disillusioned Claybourne a well-paid commission to train his recruits.
Although British rule
in India ended in 1947, the movies continued to celebrate the “sun never sets”
colonial tradition into the 1950s and even beyond. If you expect that “Bengal
Brigade” will cue the opening notes of “Rule Britannia” from the studio’s stock
library of music, you’ll be right on the money, and you won’t have to wait
long. Given today’s wide
availability of Indian actors, the old practice of hiring whites to play native
Indians seems outdated and demeaning, but you’d have come up empty in 1953 to
find a Priyanka Chopra or Irrfan Khan in central casting. The only exceptions here are
performers Sujata and Asoka Rubener in a brief, non-speaking dance routine. At that, Arnold Moss as the
rajah and Michael Ansara as Claybourne’s native sergeant offer more nuanced
performances than the Rule Britannia music might suggest. Anyway, before you attack old
Hollywood for its insular ways, just remember that even today, few Steven
Spielberg fans wince at the unvarnished chauvinism of “Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom.”
The “Rock Hudson
Collection” includes theatrical trailers for all three films and fine audio
commentary on two of them by Nick Pinkerton (“Seminole”) and Phillipa Berry
(“The Golden Blade”).
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