Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Quantrill's Raiders (1958)

Allied Artists
Directed by Edward Bernds
My rating: 2 stars out of 4
IMDb
(Turner Classic Movies)

Steve Cochran is a Captain in the Confederate Army sent to Kansas with orders for a group of rag-tag guerrillas to attack a Union outpost. Cochran romances a local boardinghouse owner and befriends her son, but sneaks off to help his Rebel friends at all hours. In one scene, he threatens to slit the young boy's throat to get out of jail, but later they both seem to act as if it never happened. Cochran's poorly defined character is the main problem with the film, his Jekyll and Hyde personality leaves no one to root for. The CinemaScope presentation is wasted on the rocky landscape of southern California, a poor substitute for eastern Kansas.

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