Fighting Caravans [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

A semi-clone of "The Big Trail", Cooper takes over the spot DUKE played, as a frontiersman/guide for a wagon train.

While "Fighting Caravans" is not as expansive as "The Big Trail", and while the young Gary Cooper is no young John Wayne, this early western is pretty entertaining.

In the story, Cooper helps the wagon train fend off Indians and evil traders, while his two crusty companions try and save him from falling in love.

There's plenty of action, and there's even a hint of pre-code Hollywood, as Cooper's character practically attempts to blackmail his new sweetheart into fooling around with him.

Laserlight/Delta found a pretty fair print, but there are several missing frames. The image will occasionally "black out", but while annoying, does not interfere with viewing. Originally 92 minutes, this print seems to be more or less intact, missing perhaps two or three minutes.

The story moves along well, and the opening credits alone are pretty snazzy for 1931.

The film has much to recommend it, and while "The Big Trail" is superior, this early Cooper vehicle is worth adding to your western DVD collection. Especially for the low price the disc is being offered at, you should definitely pick this one up.

Film fans should look (or listen!), for Eugene Pallette, of "The Adventures of Robin Hood" fame. He's here in a minor supporting role some seven years before he played Friar Tuck.

Though not quite as good as Wild Horse Mesa, which was the only previous example of this series that I had seen, this low-rent BW Western has its points. Gary Cooper, then 30 and still more or less confined to B-pictures, plays Clint Belmet, a young frontiersman who, with the Civil War raging back East, signs on, along with his mentors Bill Jackson (Ernest Torrance) and Jim Bridger (Tully Marshall), to guide a wagon train to the Coast. The army is being withdrawn from the Western posts, making the trip doubly hazardous, and a spirited young woman named Felice (Lily Damita), granddaughter of one of Lafayette's officers, who is bound and determined she'll make it to California without any male help, complicates the picture still more when she helps Jackson and Bridger extract Clint from the clutches of a Missouri lawman (Charles Winninger). The hard hand of nature is also against the wagoners as they struggle over rivers and mountains (internal hints suggest that they're taking a southern route, probably the old Santa Fe Trail). Meanwhile Clint, uncomfortable with the concept of owing his precious liberty to a woman, is trying to strike a balance between his attraction and gratitude to Felice and his obligations to the two old men who've raised him.

Cooper here is clearly establishing the laconic, woman-shy persona he would bring to the screen in many films to come, while Damita (who, like Cooper, had begun in silents, mostly German and French ones, and ten years hence would become the mother of Errol Flynn's son Sean) plays off him well as a brave spitfire in love. The movie also has the great advantage of having been filmed at a time when there were still many technical advisors around who had actually known the Old West, or at least heard of it from those who had; the wagons particularly are very authentic. Perhaps the most enjoyable aspects are Torrance as the shambling Scotsman Jackson and Marshall as Bridger--they provide not only some good comic scenes but a certain pathos as representatives of a class of frontiersman quickly growing obsolete, yet well aware that without them the newly developing West could never have existed.

I like Gary Cooper! The movie was kinda cheesy but " the Coop" was great. He is a gentleman, where in this day & age there are very few. I just like him.