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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