Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where Hollywood played loose and fast with the facts. Scriptwriting aside, casting and costuming leave a lot to be desired in the accuracy department. Victor Mature plays the title role. His Italian ancestry and some heavy makeup apparently made him perfect for the character and entitled to wear a ridiculous set of red painted feathers on his forehead.
I wasn't around in the 1800s, but I'm fairly confident no Native American of the time period wore a warbonnet quite like "Chief Purple Plumes" here.
The fort in the film is almost certainly the same one that sat in Custer State Park for years and can be seen in a brief clip in "How the West Was Won."
In another case of different movies sharing the same sets and props, this very tepee with it's rainbows and bull buffalo painted over the doorway is also seen in the 1951 film "Tomahawk," which will be featured in my next post.
I also find it odd that the poster above mentions the battle of the Little Bighorn, but in the movie the battle is represented by an image of clouds with battle sounds. Apparently budget concerns may not have allowed recreating the battle itself."Chief Crazy Horse" is available for viewing at NetFlix.
In 1955 Universal International Pictures released "Chief Crazy Horse," which supposedly depicts the life of the famed Lakota warrior. It was filmed in South Dakota's Black Hills and Badlands.
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It's a pretty low budget creation. With a strange hunger for bright colors in all the wrong places. Typical 1950s😢 dialogue. Given the many descendants of Lakota who were alive at the time there was no excuse for the faulty historical references in the film. It is however one of the few early films to present a sympathetic Indigenous people's world view. It isn't great or even very good. It does show the real sorrow of a father who loses his child to a white man's epidemic. Many historians mentioned these loses as footnotes are has effort to deflect the blame associated with the millions of deaths in Indian Country. These Deaths by illness are not a footnote but often central to the story of Genocide. You will notice that the Holocaust historians do not footnote the blame for deaths by counting separately those who died of illness in the camps. So do not think that our Indigenous people count their loses . This film reminds us of those deaths by 1955. That we so quickly forgot them again is a great sadness.
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