Devil's Doorway (1950)

Directed by Anthony Mann; produced by Nicholas Nayfack

An aboriginal veteran (Robert Taylor) of the U.S. Civil War returns to his home in the Wyoming Territory of the late 1860s. After genially greeting old acquaintances, he begins to learn that while everyone treated him as an equal for the previous three years, now, he is seen as a member of an inferior race. Furthermore, the land that he and his family had thought they owned is, by law, open to homesteading. His battle for his home has just begun.

A very early cinematic exposé of the racial and legal discrimination against American Indians, Devil’s Doorway is also an exciting action film. Taylor’s performance is very good, his character slipping from hopeful optimism to grim resentment and determination as the film progresses. It is a realistic character. If the movie suffers from anything, however, it is that his is the only part that really stands out. The acting from the other performers is good, but there isn’t much they can do with their parts; each character does what it should to propel the story, but that’s it.

This problem may seem to be a criticism of the writing, but is not; the writing is laudable, but – consciously, I think – sacrifices depth in the majority of the characters to allow Taylor to tell the story. This story has the usual bar-fights and gun-battles expected of westerns, but there is an underlying history lesson that drives the plot. The barriers thrown up against Indians were many and formidable at the time, and Taylor’s reactions make their effect on people palpable. The scene in which he learns that Indians are not U.S. citizens but wards of the state, like parentless children, is almost heart-breaking.

But one of the advantages of Devil’s Doorway is that it makes neither whites nor Indians, as such, villains. The arrival of sheepmen, needing grazing and water for their flocks, precipitates a conflict, but the newcomers are mostly reasonable people. Nor is Taylor made flawless. His intransigence, when his lawyer urges compromise, also contributes to the problem. But we are shown both sides of this particular argument: while the sheepmen demand water and grass for their animals, with the alternative being ruin and starvation, Taylor sees negotiation as the abdication of his peoples’ rights, and therefore their ruin.

There is of course the bigoted white man (Louis Calhern) to act as a catalyst. His motives in prodding the two sides toward battle are not given, though as a former regular Army soldier, probably an officer, he likely had fought Indians in many a combat. He is more a representation of a certain type than an individual. And the female lawyer (Paula Raymond) Taylor hires is an anachronism: woman lawyers began practicing soon after this movie’s time-period. This does not prevent a good, brief scene showing Taylor so shocked at the idea of a female lawyer that he actually flees her office, only to return when he silently muses on the irony of discriminating against her because of her gender.

The treatment of Indians in westerns is, stereotypically, a bad one. Yet, in many examples of the genre, aboriginals are treated sympathetically if two-dimensionally as the victims of unscrupulous whites – usually individuals and rarely the government as a whole. Often they are depicted as simple, sometimes even child-like, but just as often, their bellicosity appears as the result of ill and unfair treatment. Devil’s Doorway was one of the first to show how such treatment was entrenched in official policy, and how anger over it could frequently have only one outcome.

A tragedy historically and dramatically, Devil’s Doorway is almost bleak in the inevitability of its story. Nonetheless, it is an eminently watchable film that will appeal to fans of westerns and action flicks, and maybe to those who like to see fictionalized history on film.