JohnHowardReid Producer: William Cagney. A William Cagney Production. Copyright 30 March 1951 (in notice: 1950) by Cagney Productions, Inc. A Warner Bros Picture. New York opening at the Strand: 13 April 1951. U.S. release: 21 April 1951. U.K. release: 18 February 1952 (sic). Australian release: 13 March 1952. 105 minutes. SYNOPSIS: Cavalry captain leads a small group of misfits to hold back an impending Indian attack through a narrow mountain pass. COMMENT: Realized on a grand scale, Only the Valiant is a tensely suspenseful, actionful western with more explosive excitement than a jammed jackhammer. The intriguing central situation is cleverly and deftly grounded by a fast-moving introduction in which not only the plot groundwork is laid but the characters are forcefully introduced. Each character is skilfully rounded, providing some excellent opportunities for the fine cast of seasoned players. In one of his more interesting roles, Peck properly dominates the film. Peck is always at his best in less sympathetic parts and here he has a field day as a martinet captain in conflict with the likes of Neville Brand's bitter, bullying sergeant, Ward Bond's guzzling corporal whose surface charm so quickly turns to murderous hate, Lon Chaney's vengeful strongman, Terry Kilburn's cowardly bugler and Steve Brodie's victimised Southerner. Although she has been criticized in some quarters, I thought Barbara Payton didn't put a foot wrong in her poignantly effective study of the heroine. Whilst she plays no part in the main section of the film, her performance and sheer presence is memorable enough to more than retain our sympathy. All the actors deserve commendation, particularly Gig Young, Jeff Corey, Hebert Heyes, Dan Riss and those mentioned above. As stated, all have solid characterisations to work with. The only exception is Trooper Rutledge, who is deliberately painted along more shadowy lines. His motives are less obvious, more obscure. Anderson accordingly plays him in an appropriately enigmatic manner, as his actions have to come as a surprise - which they certainly do! For their obligatory Old Testament quotation, the writers have come up with something admirably fresh. I tracked it down to Job 14:7-12: "There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the roots wax old in the earth, and the stock die in the ground, yet through the scent of water it will bud and again bring forth boughs like a plant. But man dieth, and wasteth away; yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail in a drought, and even a flood doth recede and dry up, so men lie down and rise not. Till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep."OTHER VIEWS: Directed with considerable panache and vigor, Only the Valiant stakes a hard-to-beat claim as Gordon Douglas' most exciting and most accomplished film. Blessed with a taut script, an accomplished cast and a photographer with a fine eye for both location and studio compositions, Douglas has risen to the occasion with pace and style. Creating an atmosphere loaded with tension, the director has drawn engrossing portrayals from all his players and staged the action with passionate immediacy. Not a single second wasted in 105 edge-of-the-seat minutes. - John Howard Reid writing as Tom Howard,

TheLittleSongbird Only the Valiant isn't a great movie, but it is a good one. It is sluggishly paced however, with some parts that feel drawn out, and there were times when the direction was lacking. That said, Only the Valiant is very well shot, the black and white cinematography looks good, and the scenery is authentic. Also good is the score, which is suitably rousing, the script is decently structured and the story is interesting while taking inspiration from Fort Apache and Red River. The acting ranges from decent to very good; I am not a huge Gregory Peck fan(I sometimes find him dull) but he does a good job as the ruthless and tight-lipped martinet officer, and Barbara Payton is luminous and pretty as Cathy. Ward Bond, Gig Young and Jeff Corey are much more impressive though. Overall, not perfect, but worth the look. 7/10 Bethany Cox

bkoganbing In the book that Michael Freedland wrote about Gregory Peck, Only the Valiant is described as the worst film Gregory Peck ever made. During those beginning years of his stardom it seems like just about every film became a classic of some kind. Only the Valiant was shot on the cheap and it shows. The book says that Gregory Peck's cavalry uniform was an old costume worn by Rod Cameron in one of his B westerns. It was an independent production by James Cagney and as part of the deal Peck got Barbara Payton who had a contract with Cagney himself and was used in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye which he produced and also starred in.According to Michael Freedland's book, Peck who was still tied to David O. Selznick got $60,000.00 for the part of cavalry captain Richard Lance. Selznick got $150.000.00 and Peck was not a happy camper. Still being the professional he was, Peck did the film.In truth Only the Valiant is a far better film than MGM's big budget The Great Sinner which Peck also starred in. Mainly because of a very competent crew of players that James Cagney gathered for this film. And an interesting script which contains elements of Beau Geste, The Lost Patrol, The Dirty Dozen and David and Bathsheba which Peck had starred in.Peck and Gig Young are rivals for Barbara Payton and Peck is ordered to send Young on a patrol to take hostile Apache chief Michael Ansara to a better staffed army fort. Young gets killed and Ansara escapes and the old Uriah the Hittite story starts circulating at Peck's post.Later he gets an assignment to man an abandoned fort that sits across a narrow mountain pass that the Apaches can't even charge through on horseback. He takes a select group of army misfits, some of whom would like to kill him worse than the Apaches.Even with Ward Bond as an alcoholic corporal, any resemblance between these soldiers and those John Ford cavalry pictures is coincidental. The ones who he takes with him, Sergeant Neville Brand, Lieutenant Dan Riss, Bond, Troopers Terry Kilburn, Steve Brodie, and Lon Chaney, Jr. are a collection that Lee Marvin would gladly have taken on a mission.Chaney has the strangest role. He's named Kabushyan and he's Armenian though the men refer to him as A-rab. He's got one big old gay crush on Gig Young though it's not spelled out due to Code restrictions and he hates Peck worse than the others. It's the best performance in the film.Only the Valiant has an A list cast with B production values, I wish it had been done with a bigger budget.

James Hitchcock Contains spoilers'Only the Valiant' is an example of the 'cavalry film', that sub-genre of the Western that tells the story of the conflict between the US Army and the native Indians of the American West during the second half of the nineteenth century. The central character, Captain Richard Lance, is an Army officer known as a stickler for discipline and for doing everything by the book. Lance is already unpopular with the men under his command, and becomes even more hated when a popular subordinate, Lieutenant Holloway, is killed while leading a dangerous mission to escort Tuscos, a captured Apache chief, to prison. The rumour spreads among the men that Lance deliberately nominated Holloway for the mission because the two were rivals for the hand of the same woman. In fact, Lance wanted to undertake the mission himself and was prevented from doing so by a direct order from his commanding officer, but he never explains this to the men. The Apaches, led by the rescued Tuscos, are preparing for war against the white man, and it looks as though Fort Winston, the fort where Lance is based, will be attacked in overwhelming numbers. Lance volunteers to lead a small detachment of men to hold another fort, Fort Invincible, abandoned after being damaged in an earlier Apache raid. Fort Invincible commands a strategic pass through the mountains; Lance believes that if he and his men can hold it for a few days, this will gain enough time to allow a relieving force to reach Fort Winston. He is allowed to hand-pick the men who will accompany him on this mission, but instead of picking the best men available, he picks the worst, what he calls the 'dregs' of the unit. Each of these has a particular weakness- one is a coward, one a drunk, another a deserter, another a brawler, and so on. Even before the Holloway incident, Lance seems to have had the knack of making enemies and alienating people, and all of these men have good reason to hate both him and one another.The aim of the filmmakers was presumably to produce a 'character-driven' film in which a motley collection of men learn to work together, the idea being that the tale of how a bunch of misfits learn to work and fight together is more interesting than a similar story told about a well-disciplined and motivated crack unit. The film's main weakness is that this concept, as told here, is not really credible. Lance tells the men quite bluntly that he has chosen them for the mission because they are the worst soldiers in the fort, and explains that he has done so because they are the men who can most easily be spared. The whole point, however, is that Fort Invincible must be held for long enough to allow the relieving force to arrive. If this plan succeeds, the whole garrison may be saved. If it fails, Fort Winston is likely to be overrun and the garrison massacred, regardless of the caliber of the men left behind. It therefore follows that Lance would want the best possible men under his command in Fort Invincible, not the worst. It is also unclear why it is never explained to the men that Lance was not responsible for sending Holloway on the fateful mission. If military etiquette would have prevented Lance from disclosing the contents of a conversation with a superior officer, the Colonel himself should have made this clear in order to defuse a situation that was becoming prejudicial to good discipline.Another weakness lies in the character of Lance himself, who is too cold to arouse the viewer's sympathy, even though he eventually turns out to be the man who saves the day and wins the girl. His tactlessness, arrogance and gift for making enemies make him an unlikely leader of men. It seems unlikely that a military unit so riven by feuds and hatred and led by such a martinet could ever accomplish the simplest task, let alone succeed in a highly dangerous mission. I also disliked the way the Indians were portrayed as bloodthirsty, whooping savages, with no attempt made to present their point of view or to understand why they felt such hatred for the white man. The only Indian we hear speak is Tuscos, who makes boastful speeches about how the 'dog soldiers' will be dust beneath the hooves of his horses. This stereotypical view of the American Indian was perhaps not uncommon in films of this period, although even in the early fifties there were movies that took a more liberal view. 'Broken Arrow', for example, had been released a year before 'Only the Valiant'. (Stereotypes, incidentally, are not confined to the portrayal of the Indians. Ward Bond's drunken, garrulous, belligerent Irishman seems to be a character lifted straight from the pages of a music-hall joke book). There are some better features of the film; the stark black-and-white photography, for example, is effective, and some of the battle scenes are well done. On the whole, however, the film is too lacking in credibility and the characters too unsympathetic. This is not one of Gregory Peck's better efforts. 5/10