In Seminole Uprising (1955) George Montgomery plays a Texas army lieutenant of mixed descent forced to go to war with a Seminole half-brother (Steven Ritch) to save the life of his estranged lover (Karin Booth) – now engaged to his superior officer (Ed Hinton). One obvious observation of the film: it has no shortage of melodramatic potential.

This is not the first 1955 western to feature the Seminole: they featured as an anonymous violent horde in R. John Hugh’s Yellowneck. They receive a little more sympathy here. Of course they are played by white actors in brownface make-up, as was the practice of the time, but at least their titular uprising is presented as at least partially justified. In a key scene midway through the film, it transpires that white hostages – a woman and her child – have been accidentally killed by their Seminole captors. The morally dubious Captain Dudley (Hinton) takes possession of equivalent hostages – the children of tribal chief Black Cat (Ritch) – and immediately hands them over to a white mob, and presumed certain death. Even while the film engages in a quite racist depiction of the Seminole (the original inhabitants of what is now Florida), it does not shy away from showcasing white racism against them too. The mean-spirited racist attitude of early westerns have, by the mid-1950s, shifted and evolved. Representations have evolved to a more benevolent sort of paternal colonialism – an attitude that continues to develop until it evolves once again towards the end of the century. Steven Ritch, is must be noted, is dreadful as  Black Cat: almost entirely unconvincing, and tediously wooden in the role.

The performances are much better from George Montgomery and Karin Booth, and from William Fawcett as Montgomery’s ornery sidekick. While the film sets up a major conflict between Montgomery’s Lieutenant Elliot and Captain Dudley, it then contrives to close off the plot thread with the characters in entirely different places. A promised confrontation between them simply doesn’t occur.

A climactic showdown between the Texas army and Seminole rebels is staged with a surprising level of scale, albeit one supported by some re-used footage from earlier films. Production values are fairly steady across the board, thanks to director Earl Bellamy. Seminole Uprising catches him near the beginning of his directing career, which would be balanced between film and television work, but by 1955 he had already worked as assistant director on From Here to Eternity (1953), It Should Happen to You (1954), and A Star is Born (1954).

This is a frustrating film of good elements and wobbly execution. Robert E. Kent’s screenplay does not do a particularly good job of exploiting the various characters and narrative assets. There were plenty of worse westerns in 1955. There were certainly many that were better.

1955 West is a review project to watch as many western features from 1955 as possible, in order to gain a ‘snapshot’ view of the genre at its height. According to Letterboxd, there were 72 westerns released that year; this is the 26th film reviewed. You can see all of FictionMachine’s reviews of them to date by clicking here.