Robert D. Webb’s 1955 western White Feather begins with a voiceover by star Robert Wagner, assuring the audience that what they are about to see is based on a true story. As is almost always the case in Hollywood, that claim is only true in the broadest of strokes. The film relates one of the final incidents of the so-called Indian Wars: conflicts between the colonising United States and the indigenous First Nations of North America.

Wagner plays Josh Tanner, a surveyor dispatched to 1870s Wyoming to lay out properties for gold prospecting along a river. The territory is contested by the Cheyenne, the last Native American tribe resisting the US cavalry’s demands to move south, and Tanner soon finds himself irrevocably tied up in local affairs, including a friendship with Cheyenne warrior Little Dog (Jeffrey Hunter) and a love affair Little Dog’s sister Appearing Day (Debra Paget).

It is a film of good and bad – both aspect due to the time in which the film was made. On a positive note the film takes a particularly sympathetic look at the Cheyenne community’s plight. It spends the majority of its time in their company, a rarity for mid-1950s westerns, and portrays their lead characters with intelligence, dignity, and warmth. There is to an extent a sense of Kevin Costner’s western Dances with Wolves (1990) about it, in the manner in which it embeds a white colonial man into a Native American world. That was ground-breaking in 1990, so one can imagine how progressive it appears for a film made 35 years earlier.

Sadly while the film is remarkably forward-thinking for its time, it is nonetheless a product of that time. The Cheyenne characters are uniformly cast with white actors: not just Hunter and Paget, but also Eduard Franz as Chief Broken Hand and Hugh O’Brian as the aggressive American Horse. It is a perpetual problem for westerns of this generation. While one can easily argue White Feather is a film from 1955 and thus its racism forgivable, it is still inevitably being watched in the 21st century. Our immediate awareness of its casting problems do not entirely go away because of the film’s age. It is up to the individual to conclude which is worse: to cover white actors in brownface makeup, as was the tradition of the time, or to simply leave them looking remarkably white as Webb does here, and thus erasing any sense of non-hegemonic skin colour at all. Certainly keeping Debra Paget white must have made her romance with Wagner’s character more tolerable for a 1950s audience.

White Feather was co-written by Delmer Daves, and studies the western from a Native American perspective in a similar manner to his earlier directorial features Broken Arrow (1950) and Drum Beat (1954). Daves was scheduled to direct White Feather as well, but when his contract at 20th Century Fox was not renewed the task shifted to Robert D. Webb instead. Webb’s work is solid, and does take advantage of the wide-screen scenery. While the film does not always hit exceptional dramatic beats, when it manages it does so excellently: particularly during the film’s quite heart-breaking climax.

White Feather‘s drawbacks have outweighed its strengths, and in the present day it is now a quite obscure and half-forgotten production. It is worth remembering, despite its faults, as another positive step in the American western’s transition from expansionist myth to properly thoughtful drama. It may be one step along a road, but it is a step further than where the genre was before White Feather was made.