The Half-Breed

Poorly acted drama about Robert Young -- doing a badly acted William Powell impression -- coming between Janis Carter, doing a bad Lucille Ball imitation and Reed Hadley doing a surprisingly awful Charlton Heston imitation. Beautiful location shots don't do anything towards rescuing this picture. Not even awful enough to be interesting.

There is a passage in the Shakespeare play " A Midsummer Night's Dream "that refers to the imaginary play of Pyramus and Thisby as being both " brief and tedious" .It would serve well as a description of this quite awful piece of garbage from the early 50's as well . The eponymous hero is Charley Wolf who is part white and part Apache and who seeks to maintain the existing uneasy peace between the two races in San Remo .He is helped by a former Confederate officer ,turned gambler (Robert Young ).The local Indian agent is a devious and corrupt individual who is seeking to get the Apaches evicted from their reservation in order to get at the gold which lies hidden there .The relationship between Wolf and his ally is shattered by their competing for the affections of the same girl -a saloon singer . The script is dire and the acting woeful ;in particular the slow and over emphatic delivery of the white actors playing Native Americans is tedious .Young -a capable enough player in other movies -looks out of sorts in the Western setting. Add muddy colour and a clichéd script and the result is racist tedium and unrelenting dullness .

In this poorly contrived western the Apaches never learn why Reed Hadley and his henchmen want them off the San Remo reservation. So I won't say either.

Robert Young and Jack Beutel are respectively a jaded and disillusioned former Confederate officer now turned gambler and a half white Apache warrior. Between he two of them they have their hands filled trying to stop an Indian war that saloon owner Reed Hadley wants to start.

Coming between them is entertainer Janis Carter whom Hadley has a Snidely Whiplash interest in

The sad thing about The Half Breed is that it had potential for a serious film on race relations. Poor Jack Beutel who was Billy the Kid in Howard Hughes's Thr Outlaw. Unlike Jane Russell he never got a career on track after that legendary fiasco.

This film didn't help.

Indians, gold-seekers and dance hall girls liven this hackneyed saga of a selfish politician trying to start an uprising in order to get to the gold on Apache land. Very good scenery and strong cast; but the story is too predictable. The players include: Robert Young, Janis Carter, Jack Buetel and Reed Hadley.

This was a typical Western for early 1950's double bills but was poor by those standards. Jack Buetel stands out but sadly he should have had more films after the controversy of ' The Outlaw ' but unlike Jane Russell he did not flourish. He made a few Westerns and did nothing after 1961. Nothing was worthy of him, or his electric beginning as an actor in ' The Outlaw '. The rest of the cast are mediocre, and the film is indifferently directed. Not a film worth hunting down unless you hope Buetel has been given a decent role. The most I can say he is worth watching even with poor material. Disappointing on all levels.