Peter Viney's Blog

Custer of The West
1967

Directed by Robert Siodmak
Produced by Philip Yordan
Screenplay by Bernard Gordon and Julian Zimet
Music by Bernard Segal

CAST:
Robert Shaw- General George Armstrong Cutler
Mary Ure- Elizabeth Custer
Ty Hardin – Major Marcus Reno
Jeffrey Hunter – Captain Frederick Benteen
Lawrence Tierney – General Philip Sheridan
Marc Lawrence- the gold miner
Kieron Moore- Chief Dull Knife
Charles Stalmaker – Lieutenant Howells
Robert Hall – Sergeant Buckley
Robert Ryan – Sergeant Mulligan

The 60s Retrospective series

Let’s talk about this blonde-haired, narcissistic, arrogant, racist American leader, responsible for so many deaths … it’s November 2020 after all, but here I mean General Custer.

Effectively it’s a 1968 film. Release dates: UK November 1967, USA January 1968. It was most unusual to launch an American film in the UK first.

Oh, the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged. The Indians fell
The cavalries charged. The Indians died
Oh, the country was young then
With God on its side
Bob Dylan, With God On Our Side

I bought this one on DVD from a charity shop with Nevada Smith, and both share the ignominy of no entry in the encyclopedic  BFI Companion To The Western. The same book traces General Custer’s film portrayal from hero to zero, culminating in the film version of Little Big Man in 1970.

‘General’ Custer

I was fascinated with Custer’s Last Stand from seeing the paintings in my childhood Newnes Book of Knowledge. I’d started to read further on the Battle of The Little Big Horn well before I even read Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel, Little Big Man. The hero was Crazy Horse, not Custer. I was also fascinated by the revisionist novels about Native Americans compared to earlier fiction like The Last of The Mohicans, so much so that I had planned a Ph.D on picaresque novels on the subject … John Barth’s The Sot Weed Factor, Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man and Richard Condon’s A Talent For Loving were three of the prime candidates. A Talent For Loving was a proposed Beatles movie instead of Help!. The Ph.D never happened though I was offered a place. I decided to take a year’s breather, working with music, then started teaching English for six months and never felt the urge to return to academic studies of American Literature as a career.

Little Big Man finally nailed the Custer myth, and George MacDonald Fraser’s later Flashman & The Redskins (1982) finished it off. The Battle of Washita River in 1868 would be called a war crime one hundred years later. A Cheyenne village was attacked in the snow at night and 103 men, women and children were slaughtered. 53 women and children were literally enslaved. Don’t take Wikipedia on this – that entry is stuck in the mode that pre-dated the Vietnam War, and the My Lai massacre of 1968. Nixon paroled Lieutenant Calley after three years of his life sentence for that one. After all, they’d only charged him with 109 murders out of the 500. In modern terms Custer should have been tried as a war criminal, like the Serbian mob, not that such a crime existed in 1868.

The 7th Cavalry is another part of the myth. No, they didn’t all die at Little Big Horn, though 266 did. At that time, new jobless immigrants were virtually pressed into the American army on arrival, a practice that had started in the Civil War. Custer’s 7th Cavalry men were about half recent German and Irish immigrants, thus the battlefield echoed to Achtung! and Begorrah! Studies of remains indicate that they were malnourished.

The film

The odd thing about Custer of The West is that I had no memory of the film, but I have had a framed copy of the soundtrack LP for five or more years. I collect some LPs purely on sleeve design, and this one is a classic Wild West epic painting.

Custer of The West was the last of twenty-odd films about Custer before the total reversal with Little Big Man. It was filmed in Spain, soon to be the location of so many westerns.

The story

WARNING 1: PLOT-SPOILERS
WARNING 2: BULLSHIT HISTORICALLY

We meet Custer being sent on a series of cavalry charges in the Civil War to stirring music. He’s given a choice of post-war jobs, including New York, and selects maintaining order in the Dakotas (possibly knowing that in the future an electoral college vote in North Dakota would be worth four in New York).

He sets off with his wife. The miners are causing problems. The Cheyenne have manacled two miners to a wagon which they send racing down a steep curving mountain road. One gets free enough to steer the front axle with his hands upside down … a relatively miner minor incident BUT the cinematographer had made a breakthrough in filming fast moving objects racing down a path as seen from the object. It’s long and impressive cinematically.

Custer discovers that treaties are a fake. He’s not fond of the miners himself. On arriving at the fort, which has rough hewn timber walls outside but shining polished mahogany doors inside, he decides to show how tough he is by running the whole garrison in circles till one by one they drop. Even the drummers beating time drop with RSI. He and his trusty sergeant are the only ones left running. I am a tough bastard this proclaims. I survived Covid without a mask … sorry, wrong bastard.

The Native Americans are tough bastards too. One guy’s horse drops dead and they leave him to die with it.

The Cheyenne attack and massacre a town on July 4th and set fire to the saloon. Yes, these Independence Day celebrations can get out of hand. Custer rides in to look at the wreckage.

This fictional event is presumably shoehorned in to justify the next bit. Custer does the full early morning in the snow attack and massacre at Washita. He watches from his horse. It starts as an aerial shot which impresses, not that they could do much about snow.

Custer has Chief Dull Knife in for a good talking to and threatening.

Back at the camp, a bunch of men have deserted to join the gold miners. The leading sergeant, Sergeant Mulligan (Robert Ryan), is caught, brought back and Custer visits him in his cell for a touch of philosophising before having him shot at dawn.

At some point around here, our trusty sergeant, the marathon runner, is attacked and falls into a log flume full of logs. Ah! Our cinematographer repeats the trick (I have done this ride at Disney World) and the camera is his eyes racing down the flume … to repeat … fast moving objects racing down a route as seen from the object. It’s long and impressive cinematically.

The sergeant survives the flume (which he entered barefoot but emerges from booted) and before he can get to the kiosk with the flash photos he is shot by an arrow.

Then the dastardly Cheyenne attack a train. The passengers manage to disconnect their carriage at the top of a steep incline AND our cinematographer repeats the trick for the third time … fast moving objects racing down a route as seen from the object. It’s long and impressive cinematically. Did I mention that before?

So this time the carriage rolls onto a high wooden rickety bridge over a canyon to which the Cheyenne have set fire. Many Americans plunge to their deaths! Wow! Custer could be justified in getting riled up about this.

Mr and Mrs Custer return to Washington. They’re shown an armoured carriage for shootin’ Injuns. They go to the theatre to watch a play in which a fictional Custer is the hero. He is embarrassed and angry.

Back to the West. The Native Americas are about to get their comeuppance. Custer will sort them out. Only there’s rather a lot of them.

Custer’s two hundred plus army is represented by about thirty. they don’t shoot their horses to form a barricade as in reality – though throughout the film we remarked on horses being shot and falling dramatically in battle sequences. Well trained? Hopefully.

Custer is the last to die.

Concept

The screenwriters both described the concept:

Julian Zimet: The original brief was to turn out a typical Western sainted hero martyr script, which Gordon and I duly delivered. But Robert Shaw figured he would make it over to suit himself. Which he did. He turned Custer into a sadist of Shakespearean depth.

Bernard Gordon: Production stumbled along on Custer as Julian and I tried to give the Indians a fair shake. Robert Shaw was helpful. A bright man and a fine writer, he approved of our point of view that the Indians were victims right to the end. He even wrote one speech for Custer… that made this point sharply.

Not really.  They managed to shift the main blame to General Sheridan … which is fair enough. The only good Indian is a dead Indian is attributed to him, and he says it in the film. He had a policy of wiping out the buffalo so as to remove the Native American food supply. In 1864, he instituted scorched earth warfare in the Shenandoah Valley.  Custer served under Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, but in the film we just see him leading cavalry charges rather than burning barns and fields of crops. Sherman did the same in the infamous march through Georgia. If you’re going to pull statues down (and I wouldn’t, though I’d put a plaque with context) Sheridan and Sherman are both men whose statues should be pulled down, as much or more even than the Confederate generals.

IMDB has quite a list of factual errors. Some are a touch pedantic … Custer’s army in the film has the Stars and Stripes with 50 stars. In 1876, the flag had 32 stars.  Then the cavalry charge with full flags, rather than the smaller swallow-tailed flags. Uniform details are wrong. Continuity is poor – soldiers have yellow scarves in one shot, seconds later they don’t. Custer’s horse changes colour between two shots of the same action.

Also, he’s ‘General’ throughout. It was a courtesy title. He was a ‘brevet’ major general in the Civil War, but a Lieutenant-Colonel was his correct rank. My dad used to complain bitterly about that distinction … he became a Sergeant in 1944, a Staff-sergeant in 1945, but these were ‘acting’ promotions. As he used to say, if he had been killed the widow’s pension would have been corporal. Being a Lieutenant-Colonel might explain why in the final ‘Battle’ of Little Big Horn here, his #2 is a mere Lieutenant, not even a captain or major.

Some are esoteric but interesting. In the film, they have Winchester repeating rifles. In fact, Custer’s army had single shot Springfield carbines. As it points out, if they had had repeating rifles, they might have survived.

Some are just economy. His final battle involves about thirty men. In reality,  there were around 210 at that point.

The Native-American angle

It’s hard not to type ‘Indian’ and I have a full shelf of books on Native-Americans and Native-American history, and ‘Indian’ is in most book titles. In the film, it’s Indian.

If the Cheyenne had attacked a town on the 4th of July and massacred all the inhabitants it would be a major event recorded in American history. I Googled. I feel confident in saying it did not happen.

The main Cheyenne chief is Chief Dull Knife, who existed. He was not the major figure at Little Big Horn presiding over the attack shown in the film, that was Crazy Horse, who was Lakota (Sioux). Having an obviously white actor, Kieran Moore, playing him is offensive. Moore was Irish and does not look Cheyenne apart from “blackface” (or rather “redface”) make-up.

I found the costumes amusing. There are in scenes in sand desert with dunes. You don’t find them frequently in the USA, and there is a tiny area of Death Valley labelled ‘Sand dunes’ where all those Foreign Legion and desert movies were filmed (though this was Spain). The Cheyenne in these shots have a loincloth and bare torsos. No wonder they’re red. I got out of the car to take a picture of the Death Valley sand dunes and in about five seconds I nearly dropped my iPad because it was already too hot to hold. People who live in deserts generally cover their skin. Still, I guess it was cheaper than full costumes.

Dull knife has spotless Wild West Show / Dude ranch buckskins. Having a shirt must have been his badge of rank. When the massacre at Washita is shown, the women have those Pochahontas / Peter Pan’s Tiger Lily fringed buckskin dresses.

I would say the research on Cheyenne costume was low.

Spot the difference. One of these illustrated is the real Dull Knife.

• 

• 

THE SOUNDTRACK

Bernardo Segal. The best bit of the film. I must have known.

COMMENTS

Julian Zimet: Shaw took care of the battle scenes himself. Siodmak preferred directing ballroom scenes, which he had done so often in his long career they required no invention. What he didn’t anticipate, as he choreographed fifty couples, was that the actor—whose intervention was designed to give coherence to the scene—would go crazy, punch him in the chops, and walk off the set. I was already working on another project, but Yordan insisted that I write some lines for a minor actor, which would account for the miscreant’s absence. This would allow the ballroom scene to continue, save having to locate the crazy or drunk actor, and save having to reshoot. While Siodmak kept the dancers in motion, I rehearsed the new actor in his role, and tailors stitched together a bespoke uniform. Within minutes he burst upon the scene, apologised on behalf of the government minister for his absence—due to a crisis in Washington—and announced an impending honour for Custer. It was a weak solution, but it saved a lot of money. That’s show business for you

Many were unimpressed by the attempt to shoehorn two different viewpoints into the same film – the mistreatment of the Native Americans by American troops, and the portrayal of Custer as an American hero who was not to blame for the disaster. The general inaccuracies of the film were also questioned, particularly the portrayal of the Battle of The Little Bighorn.
Wikipedia entry on the film (NOT Custer)

THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …

The Six Five Special (1958)
A Taste of Honey (1961)
The Young Ones (1962
Some People (1962)
Play It Cool (1962)
Summer Holiday (1963)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
What A Crazy World (1963)
Live It Up! (1963)
Just For You (1964)
The Chalk Garden (1964)
The Carpetbaggers (1964)
Wonderful Life (1964)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1965)
Gonks Go Beat (1965)
The Party’s Over (1965)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Catch Us If You Can (1965)
Help! (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Nevada Smith (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Custer of The West (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
Girl On A Motorcycle (1968)
The Bofors Gun (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
Medium Cool (1969)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970)
Performance (1970)
Oh, Lucky Man! (1973)