Dakota Incident (1956)

Written by CinemaSerf on June 11, 2022

The billing for this film is slightly misleading. Certainly it is about a group of stagecoach passengers trapped in a dried out river valley by some angry natives, but that is only after what seems like an age of preamble in the nearby town where scores are settled and the feisty entertainer "Amy" (Linda Darnell) tries to buy, beg or blag her way to Laramie. Ward Bond seems to quite enjoy his role as the rather optimistic "Sen. Blakely" and Regis Toomey also enters into the spirit as her "Minstrel" but the leading men - Dale Robertson ("Banner") and John Lund ("Carter") are little more than rough round the edges eye candy delivering what is, admittedly, a pretty banal script. Lewis Foster does manage to redeem it in the last twenty minutes or so - the effects of their siege: lack of water, sunstroke and their general mistrust of each other does make for quite a decent denouement. It could lose twenty minutes without compromising the story, and it could do with stronger leading man but otherwise this is a watchable, but forgettable western that, unusually, allows the leading lady to shine.