Cattle Drive | |
---|---|
Directed by | Kurt Neumann |
Written by | Lillie Hayward Jack Natteford |
Produced by | Aaron Rosenberg |
Starring | Joel McCrea Dean Stockwell Chill Wills Leon Ames Bob Steele |
Cinematography | Maury Gertsman |
Edited by | Danny B. Landres |
Color process | Technicolor |
Production company | Universal International Pictures |
Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
Release date |
|
Running time | 77 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Cattle Drive is a 1951 American Western film directed by Kurt Neumann and starring Joel McCrea, Dean Stockwell and Chill Wills. Much of the film was shot in the Death Valley National Park, California and Paria, Utah.
Chester Graham Jr. (Dean Stockwell), the spoiled young son of a wealthy railroad owner, gets lost in the middle of nowhere when he wanders away from a train during a water stop. He is found by a cowboy (Joel McCrea) who is part of a cattle drive. Lucky to be alive, the boy has to tag along with the cowboys. He learns the value of hard work, self-discipline and comradeship while working with the men on the trail to Santa Fe.
The basic story—about a rich brat who gets lost in a dangerous place far from home, then learns character and values from the working men who rescue him—echoes that of 1937's Oscar-winning film Captains Courageous, adapted from a novel by Rudyard Kipling. [1] The key difference, besides the fact that the leading man does not get killed in the end, is that "Cattle Drive" is set in a desert area and not at sea.
A variation of the same plot was also used in Season 5, Episode 5 of Rawhide, Incident of the Prodigal Son and in Season 3, Episode 7 of The Virginian, Big Image... Little Man.
Parts of the film were shot in Paria, Utah, and Death Valley. [2]
Joel Albert McCrea was an American actor whose career spanned a wide variety of genres over almost five decades, including comedy, drama, romance, thrillers, adventures, and Westerns, for which he became best known.
Robert Dean Stockwell was an American actor with a career spanning seven decades. As a child actor under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he appeared in Anchors Aweigh (1945), Song of the Thin Man (1947), The Green Years (1946), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), The Boy with Green Hair (1948), and Kim (1950). As a young adult, he had a lead role in the 1957 Broadway and 1959 screen adaptation of Compulsion; and in 1962 he played Edmund Tyrone in the film version of Long Day's Journey into Night, for which he won two Best Actor Awards at the Cannes Film Festival. He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama for his starring role in the 1960 film version of D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.
Theodore Childress "Chill" Wills was an American actor and a singer in the Avalon Boys quartet.
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Cattle drives were a major economic activity in the 19th and early 20th century American West, particularly between 1850s and 1910s. In this period, 27 million cattle were driven from Texas to railheads in Kansas, for shipment to stockyards in St. Louis and points east, and direct to Chicago. The long distances covered, the need for periodic rests by riders and animals, and the establishment of railheads led to the development of "cow towns" across the frontier.
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