Sunday, September 08, 2019

Tonka (1958)

A young Sioux captures a horse and trains him. A fellow tribesman with a penchant for cruelty claims the horse for himself. Concurrently to that, a great confrontation between Sioux and Whites gathers steam.

Juvenile Western. As usual in this kind of production, violence is toned down. They couldn't purge it altogether, though, as the Little Big Horn battle is essential to the storyline. The film tries to depict both Whites and Endogenous Americans as essentially good intentioned as a whole with a few bad apples amongst them. The idea of centering a story about a human conflict on a horse is interesting; it steers the movie into a resolution which is preposterous from a historical angle, yet not entirely unsatisfactory from a dramatic one.

Rating: 45

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