Yellowstone Kelly (1959)

You might be forgiven for thinking you were about to watch a 1959 version of "Brokeback Mountain" as Edd Byrnes eyes up Clint Walker's trapper on a riverboat before delivering his chat-up line. Of course, I'm reading a subtext here that obviously doesn't exist. In this thoroughly innocent Boy's Own western from director Gordon Douglas, Walker,with a couple of barrels for a chest, is "Yellowstone Kelly" and Byrne is the boy who has taken a fancy to him, (a thoroughly innocent fancy,I might add). They team up, setting up house together in Indian territory, where they run up against John Russell's somewhat wooden, effete Indian chief and his hot-headed nephew, (a very unlikely Ray Danton).This is a good old-fashioned film, if a little top-heavy in male bonding with too many actors who are fundamentally nothing but eye-candy and it's beautifully shot in some pretty spectacular scenery. There's not much in the way of plot and the script, by Burt Kennedy, no less, has every cliché in the book but it's never less than entertaining in a mindless sort of way.

A real B movie Western that's showing its age. Of course it wasn't unusual during the genre's heyday to find white actors playing Native Americans or to find story lines that portrayed them as duplicitous savages, but the breathtaking racism of this script, coupled with some hilarious casting, with a quite obviously blue-eyed white guy as the Sioux chief, makes it a pretty challenging watch for a modern audience.Some nice cinematography and decent enough fight scenes are mildly diverting, but it's certainly not a classic of the genre. More, it's a reminder of how, at worst, the Western was a pretty ruthless exercise in historical revisionism.

I just watched this. I may have seen it before, I don't know.This was pleasantly predictable -- I dislike nasty surprises -- and quite a lot more politically correct than one would expect for the time it was shot.Every man in the movie is hot for the woman -- claims to the contrary by some are absurd and sensationalist wishful thinking -- and she eventually goes for the good guy. Clint Walker's character evolves from somewhat self-serving to completely self-sacrificing.John Russell is okay in a role very different from his usual. He as the Sioux leader and Clint Walker are both aware that the cause of Native Americans is lost and there is no point in piling up dead bodies in one pointless battle after another. The US Government had already torn the heart out of the entire Native American land.Andra Martin is so hot it almost doesn't matter that they chose a blue-eyed actress over a brown-eyed one, as though one were more captivating than the other.Clint Walker is a friend of a friend and I'm glad I saw this and that I appreciated it. It wasn't intended to be great art, just entertainment.

Sure, Gordon Douglas directed some pictures they are not worth watching - like all of (star)directors including Ford, Hawks, Lang or Hitchcock too. For me is Douglas one of the most underrated US-filmmakers of the fifties and sixties, because he did great jobs in very different genres. "Formicula" for example is a thrilling horror- stuff, "The Detective" a fine police-movie with Frank Sinatra. His best pictures did Douglas in the western-genre, and I think, "Rio Conchos", "Barquero" and "Fort Dobbs" should have a place in the hall of fame of western. His best picture at all for me is "Yellowstone Kelly" from Warner Bros., an also underrated western, which tells the story of mountain man Luther Kelly, who has a romance with a young Sioux maid on dangerous ground. A long time he don't accept the voice of his heart, and so his young sidekick, a greenhorn impressive portrayed by Edward Byrnes, must die. Big Clint Walker, also appears in "Fort Dobbs", is wonderful in the role of Kelly, and in the supporting cast you may find excellent actors like Claude Akins, Ray Danton and Warren Oates at the beginning of their career. The action scenes are well-made, the Technicolor-photographed landscape is so beautiful like Max Steiners score. If you like western, this picture for sure will become one of your all-time-favorites.