Hondo (1953)

In a depopulated site at the Arizona desert, a stranger arrives at a ranch where a woman lives with her six-year-old son. She says her husband is due back in a few days. She gives shelter to the stranger, who tells her that the Apache are going to wage war against the white men.

Paeans to the half-breed were becoming very common in the American cinema from the fifties onward. The subject of divided loyalty is more or less the central theme in this kind of movie. In this one, I could not help being amused at the moral juggling performed by the central character, aided by the screenwriter's helpful contrivances. Anyway, around the fifties, film viewers could no longer swallow the simple white-good, red-bad kind of manicheism that previous westerns churned out. Perhaps it was worn out by exposure and the passage of time; World War II probably helped speed the process. So, they needed a little more nuanced view. Later on, they would scrap nuance once again, and go full white-bad, red-good in Dances with Wolves and God knows what other movies. Anyway, Hondo is a moderately entertaining movie if you are not too picky about ideological issues.

Rating: 46