Little Big Horn

Two cavalry officers set out with a patrol to warn General Custer of an ambush. The ride is long and the real question is whether they will arrive at all; the film’s tension comes not from a battle but from the effort to get there in time. The account gives its events from inside the western mould of 1951 and makes room for the men of the patrol to settle accounts with one another. Because what happened at Little Bighorn is historically known, the outcome stands in the viewer’s mind from the start, and the film uses that as a weight. How the native people are drawn is the limit of the cinema of that period. Lloyd Bridges and John Ireland appear in Charles Marquis Warren’s eighty six minute American film, completed in 1951.