Warpath (film)

Warpath
Film poster
Directed by	Byron Haskin
Screenplay by	Frank Gruber
Story by	Frank Gruber[1]
Produced by	Nat Holt
Starring	Edmond O'Brien Dean Jagger Forrest Tucker Harry Carey Jr.
Cinematography	Ray Rennahan
Edited by	Philip Martin
Music by	Paul Sawtell
Color process	Technicolor
Production company	Nat Holt Productions
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date	August 1951 (1951-08)
Running time	95 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Box office	$1.25 million (US rentals)[2]

Warpath is a 1951 American Western film directed by Byron Haskin and starring Edmond O'Brien, Polly Bergen, Dean Jagger, Forrest Tucker and Harry Carey Jr. The film was released as a Fawcett Comics Film #9, in Technicolor, in August 1951.

John Vickers (Edmund O'Brien), a former United States Army / Union Army officer in the American Civil War has spent eight years hunting for the three men who murdered the woman he loved. He finds one of them, Woodson, and kills him in a gunfight, but not before learning from him that the other two men have joined the United States Army cavalry, and unbeknownst to him, in the ill-fated 7th Cavalry Regiment.

En route to the upper western Dakota Territory (now North Dakota), where Vickers plans to reenlist in the Army as a buck private recruit, then join the men under the command of General George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876), (James Millican), at Fort Abraham Lincoln, to continue his search in the ranks of the Army cavalry, he sees a sergeant named O'Hara (Forrest Tucker) physically manhandling an attractive young woman. Molly Quade (Polly Bergen), is grateful for his intervention, but Sgt. O'Hara gets even later when Vickers coincidentally ends up serving under him at the fort, giving him the most unpleasant menial dirty duties and assignments.

Molly has come to the fort to help her father Sam Quade (Dean Jagger), run a general store. He is opposed to her attraction to this new recruit Vickers. While out on an assigned mission, a troop of soldiers led by Captain Gregson (Harry Carey Jr.), are badly outnumbered by a band of Lakota Sioux warriors until being rescued by General Custer and his troops. Vickers is recognized by General Custer as a former Union Army officer from his Civil War days a decade before and is promoted to first sergeant.

O'Hara realizes that Vickers suspects him to be one of the killers of his fiancée. An ambush attempt fails, so the Sergeant deserts the Army and flees. A military wagon train is formed to evacuate civilians from the fort while Custer prepares to do battle with the Sioux natives near the Little Bighorn River further west in the southeastern portion of the adjacent Montana Territory at what turns out to be the later tragedy of the famous Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876, but along the way, Molly, her father and now Sgt. Vickers and several others are taken captive. They see that ex-Sgt. O'Hara is a prisoner too, and when he learns Custer's troops of men will be hopelessly outnumbered and trapped on two sides of separate bands of thousands of warriors and probably slaughtered, despite his earlier crimes and desertion, he tries to go warn the general and sacrifices his own life running through a gauntlet line in the village, distracting the Sioux until the others led by Vickers can escape.

After Molly and her father Sam with Vickers grab some unguarded horses behind their tent and rideM off , then a distance further off, hide from the Indians until daylight. Molly becomes aware that her father, turns out to be the third killer that Sgt. Vickers has been seeking for years. Before she can persuade Vickers not to kill him, Sam Quade rides off in the darkness by himself to try to warn Custer, which will certainly lead to his own death.

• Edmond O'Brien as John Vickers
• Dean Jagger as Sam Quade
• Forrest Tucker as Sgt. O'Hara
• Harry Carey Jr. as Capt. Gregson
• Polly Bergen as Molly Quade
• James Millican as Gen. George Armstrong Custer
• Wallace Ford as Pvt. 'Irish' Potts
• Paul Fix as Pvt. Fiore
• Louis Jean Heydt as Herb Woodson
• Paul Lees as Cpl. Stockbridge
• Walter Sande as Sgt. Parker
• Charles Dayton as Lt. Nelson
• Robert Bray as Maj. Comstock (as Bob Bray)
• Douglas Spencer as Kelso
• James Burke as Oldtimer
• Chief Yowlachie as Chief
• John Mansfield as Sub-chief
• Monte Blue as First Emigrant
• Frank Ferguson as Marshal
• Cliff Clark as Bartender
• Paul E. Burns as Bum (as Paul Burns)
• Charles Stevenson as Curier
• John Hart as Sgt. Plennert

• List of American films of 1951

• Warpath at IMDb
• Warpath at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films
• Warpath at the TCM Movie Database