Durn Good Show

A Thunder of Drums (M-G-M), the best western released so far in 1961, is three kinds of a durn good show: 1) a flawed but earnest attempt to portray the making of a man and a soldier; 2) a carefully untheatrical, affectionately vernacular attempt to revive the daily life of a frontier fort in the 1870s; 3) a masterly attempt to show what fighting Indians was really like--a hideously silent war of wits with a subtle, cruel enemy who was seldom seen until it was too late.

A young lieutenant (George Hamilton) rides into Fort Canby, Ariz., his new billet.

He is casual, elegant, handsome, a general's son who assumes that he will kill the Comanches as easily as he kills the ladies. When he reports to Canby's C.O. (Richard Boone) he gets the shock of his young life. The captain, without apparent provocation, chews him out, mocks him for a spoiled Army brat "promoted a good ten years ahead of your time," and vows to "make a soldier out of you or break you," Who put that hornet in the old man's hat? While the lieutenant is wondering, he takes a long slow look at garrison life: at the startled shake-out in the rosegrey chill of dawn, at the daily dull routine of stores and stables, at the still, interminable afternoons of stunning sun, at the choking reek of dung and 'dobe and unwashed Indian, at the scrawny, decent, infrequent girls and the better-than-nothing flirtations, at the payday booze and the leering squaws and the sudden brutal free-for-alls that burst like dust devils out of the general boredom.

And then all at once, the boredom is gone and the "hostiles" are there. They pounce on an isolated homestead, kill the men, rape and kill the women. The captain sends out a patrol commanded by a youthful officer who has just seen the elegant lieutenant, merely for the hell of it, steal his girl. With all the suption gone out of him, he blunders when he bivouacs and his troop is wiped out.

The C.O. rides out, finds the bodies, forces the lieutenant to face the murder he has done. The shock snaps the young man out of his moral torpor. The captain then gives him a narrow but viable chance to redeem himself--which is more, as subsequently appears, than the lieutenant's father once gave the captain.

The picture cannot always pass a close inspection. The boy's character is often unclear, the screenplay sometimes cluttered, the dialogue occasionally cute. But Author James Warner Bellah, who has written hundreds of horse operas for both slicks and pulps, wrote this one with historical knowledge and literary care. Director Joseph (Outcasts of Poker Flat) Newman obviously inspired his actors. Arthur O'Connell, as a coony old sergeant, gives the finest performance of his screen career. Actor Boone, in trying to evoke the warrior imago, at times seems less a man than a manner--like Paladin, the sixgun-slinger he plays on TV's Have Gun, Will Travel, he shoots every word from the lip. But at the same time, Boone sets up a strong magnetic pole that centers the whole story, and he reveals beneath the captain's military brusqueness a capacity to suffer, an intensity of tenderness that is moving and rarely beautiful to see.

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