The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer (NBC, 1977)
. Custer lives The next screen Custer who came along was James Olson, who took the part in a Warner Bros TV adaptation of Douglas C Jones’s first novel, The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer, 1976, which NBC aired in December 1977. Jones specialized in ‘alternative history’, a what-might-have-been version, and this book and […]
Don’t Touch the White Woman!/Touche pas à la femme blanche (Roissy Films, 1974)
. Custer as farce The Custer that came after Richard Mulligan’s in Little Big Man (link to our review) in 1970 was in some ways very different but in some ways quite similar. Different, because the movie was filmed in Paris, France, a Franco-Italian production, with Marcello Mastroianni as Custer; similar, because Touche […]
The Harder They Fall (Netflix, 2021)
Black is back A brief pause from the Custer thread. Autie’ll be back. In Season 3, Episode 2 of the TV show Justified, US Marshal Art Mullen talks about the Old West character Bass Reeves and says, “Good luck finding a movie about him!” And indeed, it is largely true that the whole […]
Little Big Man, the book
Little Big Man (1964) & The Return of Little Big Man (1999) by Thomas Berger Like many people, I suspect, I saw the 1970 movie Little Big Man (click the link for our review of that) before I read the source novel by Thomas Berger. This was partly because the book did not make […]
Little Big Man (NGP, 1970)
. Dangerous territory, pards… We got the occasional quite negative portrayal of Custer in the 1950s and 60s. Douglas Kennedy’s Custer in Sitting Bull (1954), for example, was arrogant and heedless of Dale Robertson’s wise advice, and in The Great Sioux Massacre (1965) Philip Carey’s version is cynically anti-Indian and of uncertain equilibrium mentally, […]
Small-screen Custer
Next After big-screen appearances in the 1960s in The Great Sioux Massacre, The Plainsman and Custer of the West, click links for our reviews, George Armstrong Custer migrated to the small screen in the fall of 1967, when Wayne Maunder was cast as the soldier in ABC’s 60-minute color show Custer, aka […]
Custer of the West (Security Pictures, 1967)
. Dreary and fake All livelinks take you to this blog’s reviews of those pictures. George Armstrong Custer, as we have seen recently on this blog, appeared frequently in Westerns, but for the most part he was a peripheral character in a story about other people. Even pictures with titles such as With […]
The Plainsman (Universal, 1966)
. Don takes Coop’s part 1966 was a bit of a year for Western remakes. A version of Stagecoach and another remake of Smoky would come out in August, and they were preceded by a bright color The Plainsman, in June. They’re tricky, remakes. If they are too faithful to the originals they are […]
The Great Sioux Massacre (Columbia, 1965)
. Custer plods ponderously over the Plains The year after Warpath (click the link for our review of that one) a film came out with a remarkably similar plot. A former officer (this time Ray Milland) enlists as a private soldier in the 7th Cavalry for personal reasons, beats tough Sergeant Forrest Tucker in […]
Chief Crazy Horse (Universal, 1955)
. A Mature Crazy Horse You might expect a mid-50s Universal movie about Crazy Horse to center on Little Bighorn but in fact Custer didn’t appear. The senior cavalry commander in this one was General Crook – played by James Millican, Custer in the 1951 picture Warpath which we reviewed the other day (click […]