Springfield Rifle

Buy This Item Springfield Rifle by Warner Home Video  Available from Amazon  $19.98  on 11-28-2008     <I>Springfield Rifle</I> is among the quirkiest of 1950s Westerns, provocatively original in mood, plot, and characterization--but also, more or less simultaneously, a bit of a mess. Gary Cooper plays a Southern-born Union officer fighting the Civil War far from conventional battlegrounds. Somewhere out West, a band of jayhawkers is selling cavalry horses to the Yankees, then stealing them to sell again to the Confederates. After losing a herd to the raiders, Cooper is court-martialed as a coward, "copperhead," or both, then thrown into dodgy complicity with the villains responsible for his disgrace. As in his earlier <I>Ramrod</I>, director Andre DeToth envelops a large cast of characters in a miasma of betrayal and ambiguity, and doesn't hesitate to kill off prominent people without warning. <i>Gunsmoke</i> creator Charles Marquis Warren worked on the script, and the pre-<i>Davy Crockett</i> Fess Parker has a droll cameo as a Reb. <I>--Richard T. Jameson</I> Reader Reviews It would be nearly impossible for Gary Cooper to follow up his Oscar-winning performance in High Noon with as great as a Western, but Springfield Rifle is more than rousingly entertaining. It is well-written and although it has some lapses in logic, it does have good plotting. Cooper plays a disgraced Union major from Virginia who falls in with Confederate raiders who are stealing Union horses and supplying them to the Confederacy. Little do the raiders know that Cooper's disgrace is a counterintelligence plot by the Union to discover the leader of the raiders and to find out who is the Union traitor who is supplying the Rebels information. Complete with fistfights, shootouts, and double crosses, this film does not hesitate in killing major characters off, but this is a necessity of the plot, otherwise, the movie wouldn't go anywhere. Cooper seems more virile and alive than he did in Springfield Rifle, and had not reached the level of his later Westerns, almost all of which were entertaining and enjoyable, but saw him playing a tired, world-weary man who just wants to find something to believe in. Cooper still seemed young and energetic enough to pull off a believable, engaging hero. Springfield Rifle deserves a DVD release, if for no other reason that to display one of Gary Cooper's last vigorous Western performances.

Springfield Rifle Available from Amazon Price: $19.98 Updated on 11-28-2008.

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