FightingWesterner As tensions between the Souix and the United States Army heat up, sympathetic Cavalry officer Dale Robertson asks and is sent to try to quell the anger of Chief Sitting Bull, who's son was recently murdered by a brutish bureaucrat.Although this gets high marks for attempting to be even handed, this American-Mexican co-production is too long and too ordinary, with a silly fifties-style romantic subplot that gets in the way of the action and swells the running time.The usually excellent character actor J. Carroll Naish is a pretty wooden Sitting Bull while Iron Eyes Cody fares much better as Crazy Horse.For a film called Sitting Bull, it spends way too much time with the Cavalry and not enough time with the title subject. Despite the disappointing performance by Naish, his scenes with Cody are much more interesting than Robertson's.The well staged battle at the Little Big Horn, reportedly the most faithful ever filmed, occurs way too late in the proceedings to help the picture and the ending is way to corny.

acg_imdb Okay, I admit it, we haven't finished it yet; we're somewhere into the second hour. It was packaged as the back half of a dollar-store DVD with "Custer" on the other side, so we bought it on a whim to see how badly you could repackage an old (probably public-domain) film in modern technology.The answer is: pretty badly. Watching this film is a challenge to determine which part is the filmmakers' fault (e.g. wooden acting; stilted dialogue) and which part is the result of an aging film that no one can be bothered to handle properly (e.g. a badly discolored old print; a truly horrendous pan-and-scan job of what was once an interesting-looking widescreen film).Of special note is the maddeningly constant, wall-to-wall musical background: cheesy weeping strings and such, non-stop, as if the filmmakers were terrified of having actual silence in the background once in a while. On the other hand, this _is_ how they liked to make films back then, so if you look at it as a period piece -- no, not as an example of life in the west, but as an example of what Hollywood churned out in the early '50s: the lighting, the acting, the hairstyles, etc. -- then it's actually interesting to watch... for a while, anyway.

alexandre michel liberman (tmwest) The best thing that can be said about this film is that it had good intentions. What makes of it almost a camp movie is the unreal, primitive, simplistic way that Sitting Bull, the battle of Little Big Horn, and all events related to it are presented. There are no qualms here about changing historical facts and the unreal attitudes of Major Bob Parrish (Dale Robertson) and also of Sitting Bull are very hard to accept. It was much more complex than that, as it can be seen on the most accurate film made so far about it "Son of The Morning Star". The fact that it was made on a big budget, Cinemascope, and has good battle scenes makes it easier to see. It also had the technical advice of "Iron Eyes Cody" who sure knew a lot about it, but probably kept most of it to himself.

frankfob Cheap, stupid, maddeningly idiotic western supposedly about Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Everything about this movie is tenth-rate--the acting is terrible, the script is absolute horsecrap with not even a PRETENSE of historical accuracy, the photography is awful, at times the camera actually shakes . . . you name it, this movie sucks at it. One of the most glaring examples of its almost complete incompetence is in the battle scenes. They'e stiff, mechanical and wretchedly directed; it looks like the actors playing the soldiers and Indians got tired of standing around waiting for someone to tell them what to do and went ahead and did it themselves. Even more irritating is the fact that the same battle scenes are replayed every 30 seconds or so, apparently in hopes that no one would notice that there wasn't enough footage shot to show a complete battle scene. The movie was filmed in Mexico (another stupid mistake by the filmmakers; the hilly, boulder-strewn, semi-desert Mexican terrain is nothing whatsoever like the rolling prairie country that was the actual locale of the battle) by American director Sidney Salkow and Mexican director Rene Cardona. Separately they were, at best, mediocre directors; together they merged into a really lousy one.All in all, this is a complete botch job at every conceivable level. Don't bother wasting your time on it.