Fort Courageous (1965)

Nice effects though.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Some scathing comments were appended to one version provided on Youtube and I feared the worst. But the wasn't too bad, apart from the last few anticlimactic minutes which others have commented on. The scenery was good and the fort looked authentic enough.Quite why two attractive women were travelling on their own across such hazardous country I don't know, and the scout fired his revolver at fleeing Indians at the most optimistic range I've ever seen, even by Western standards; his eventual death was quite gruesome for the time when the film was made.For once, none of the actors was known to me but they all did well enough.Tempted almost to give it a six, but five will do.

On his way to the military prison on Alcatraz, wrongly convicted soldier Fred Beir and his transport are attacked by marauding Indians. Barely making it to the fort, Beir and the rest of his men find it the site of a massacre and themselves surrounded.One of the last of the old-fashioned studio B-westerns, this is a stark, grim affair, with some nasty bits of violence and torture, a weird preoccupation with sexual assault(!) and a mean performance by Donald "Red" Barry as the fort's commanding officer and lone survivor.However, it drops the ball in the end, with a hastily tacked-on romance and a conclusion that's abrupt, painfully unrealistic and patently bizarre. Clocking in at a slim seventy-two minutes, there's really no excuse in the world for it to end so abruptly and so unsatisfactory!Still, it's worth watching for the most part. There's some nice black-and-white photography and a grittiness that anticipates the wave of spaghetti westerns and their American counterparts that flooded US theaters the following year and pretty much ended the need for these kind of cheaply made westerns.

Veteran B-movie helmer Lesley Selander knew a thing or two about directing low-budget westerns, but it looks like Twentieth Century Fox must have tampered with this 72-minute opus. This predictable but old-fashioned cavalry versus the Indians epic concerns an army patrol ordered to take a prisoner, Sergeant Anthony Lucas (Fred Beir of "Convict Stage"), to Fort Courageous where he will then be escorted to Fort Alcatraz to serve a ten-year stretch for raping a woman who was secretly a tramp. No, "Voodoo Island" scenarist Richard Landau doesn't resolve the issue of our hero's moral dilemma. Indeed, the woman who cried rape did because the sergeant refused her offer of sex. Another officer assures the sergeant that whatever charms the woman had to offer were not worth a decade behind bars. Anyway, a wrongly-accused cavalryman is clapped in chains and has to cross a hostile desert. Essentially, the filmmakers provide no closure about Lucas' rape sentence. The film doesn't clear him at the end. Consequently, our tarnished hero never gets his due despite the acts of heroism that he performs in transit to Fort Courageous.Inevitably, our heroes enouncter a mother and daughter along the way, and the daughter appears to have been raped by the Indians. No, Selander doesn't depict the act of rape. The Indians throw her to the ground, surround her, and she screams in horror. It might have added a dimension of complication if we knew that the daughter had not been raped,except in her mind. She could have been a counterpart to the tramp that the sergeant encountered. Nevertheless, whatever the redskins did to the girl is the equivalent of rape in the mother's eyes as well as the daughter's eyes. The Indians attack the cavalry patrol and mortally wound the captain in charge. Sergeant Lucas takes over command. Our heroes plod through the desert with the son of an Indian chieftain as their hostage and drink themselves dry before they reach the eponymous fort.Little do they know that virtually everybody in "Fort Courageous" died in the first scene. More than half-way through the Indian attack on the fort, Selander and Landau cut to the main credits and put it up with the patrol scheduled to deliver Lucas. Lucas' old pal, Indian scout Joe (Harry Lauter of "The Satan Bug"), tries to give him a chance to escape to Mexico, but Lucas amounts to the epitome of virtue. He refuses to run away. Mind you, we never see the woman that destroyed his life. Captain Howard (Don 'Red' Barry of "Shalako") is the sole survivor of the massacre. Left for dead, he manages to open the forts and then behaves like a martinet. He wants Lucas put back in chains and hangs out the Indian chieftain's son (Michael Carr of "War Party") to bake in the sun. Of course, Sergeant Lucas refuses to tolerate this brutal, inhuman behavior, and cuts down the poor Native American, only to face Howard's wrath. When Howard tries to cut a deal with the Indians under a flag of truce with the son as his hostage, things backfire. The chief's son escapes and Howard barely eludes death, largely as a result of Lucas' intervention.Unfortunately, "Fort Courageous" leaves a lot of questions unanswered. At the last minute, the mother of the daughter who was raped by the Indians decides to commit herself to Lucas and they share a screen kiss. Selander and Landau put our heroes and heroines between a rock and a hard place and then out of the blue, the movie concludes with a surprise ending that says something about the admiration that the Native Americans had for their opponents. Real Indians would have wiped them out. Harry Lauter has an unsavory death scene. He is run through with a wooden stake and the stake is set afire. The Indians leave him out in the open in front of the fort hoping that somebody will try to save the scout. Unless you enjoy old westerns, with a mite more violence than usual and some mature themes, "Fort Courageous" with its "Sergeant Rutledge" subplot isn't for you.

The male leads were basically fine but the women and the Indians, such poor acting! I own 250 Westerns and this is likely the worst one. Enjoy Cavalry vs Indians and not filmed this way anymore. A weakness to buy this one. If viewed, make it a midnighter.The ending comes up sudden and most unsatisfactory and silly.Anyways, always good to see more Westerns released. Guess never a Western not worthy for a watch, even if need be a midnighter.Rated it a 4. Struggled to say a 5 but that ending and poor acting! Worse if not a Western.A recent release "White Feather" was much better and very acceptable.