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Devil's Doorway (1950) More at IMDbPro »

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9 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
one of the best, 25 May 2001
10/10
Author: omerie from under the arch

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

wow - I'm not normally a big fan of westerns, but this one seems to excel in all departments. At first I was wondering if I would buy Robert Taylor as a full-blooded Native American character, but it's a testament to the depth and range of his talent that he had me convinced within the first minute of his screen time, without even a momentary falter throughout the rest of the film. The cinematography is nothing short of spectacular, sometimes even haunting; certain outdoor scenes are as memorable as masterpiece landscape paintings (and we're talking black & white here!)

The dramatic storyline is excellent and never misses a beat; character motivations may be surprising at times, yet they remain dramatically valid and consistent throughout the film. Even when the main character makes certain decisions with which you may not agree, you'll still understand why he does what he does.

The ending is one of the best that I know of; the final dialogue is as prophetic as it is unforgettable. I watched this movie on TCM knowing very little about it before I sat down in front of the tube, and I'm thrilled to say that I thoroughly enjoyed watching an actual 10/10. I'm really looking forward to seeing it again!

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7 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
A story which is relevant today...., 7 September 2005
Author: dbdumonteil

Another strong western by Anthony Mann.But like any intelligent western,this story is eternal.A man who fought for his country and who is denied the most legitimate of all his rights,just because he is an Indian:to own a little bit of the land to which he had given the most beautiful years of his life.That was the story of Mervyn Le Roy's "I'm fugitive from a chain gang" when Paul Muni was trying to sell his medals to survive.That would be the story of Liam Neeson in "Suspect" ,once a Vietnam veteran,now one of the last lonely and wretched .

Robert Taylor is extremely convincing,mainly when he is speaking of the land,of the way the Indians love it,of their communion with nature. We find the same emotion in Delmer Daves' "Broken arrow" ,released the same year.

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8 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
The tragedy of a man who had a naive dream., 14 August 2005
Author: tmwest from S. Paulo, Brazil

After seeing quite a lot of westerns about Native Americans I can say that not one of them made such an impact on me as this one. Broken Arrow was quite good and so was Dance with Wolves, but none of them show in such a shocking way the tragedy that fell upon this people with the colonization of the west. Robert Taylor is unbelievably convincing as a Native American who fought in the war and got a Congressional Medal of Honor. He returns to his people thinking that a new era is going to start where they will be treated as equals, but soon all his plans go down the drain. Louis Calhern is a bigoted lawyer and Paula Raymond the nice lawyer that helps Taylor. When Taylor says to Raymond that in 100 years they could have a different relationship, instinctively I asked myself if that really happened. No doubt things improved a lot, they are still far from perfect but at least a film like this one could be made in 1950 and be accepted as true. Anthony Mann was at his best on westerns with a dark side and here he shows us the talent that would be responsible for so many great films that were yet to come.

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8 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
A wonderfully understated performance by Robert Taylor as a Shoshone Indian., 26 March 2005
10/10
Author: mamalv from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

This is one of the most underrated of all the westerns of the decade. Much before its time in the realm of bigotry and racism, it is truly a masterpiece. The black and white photography is magnificent, the scenery amazing, and Robert Taylor with very little makeup, is truly the Shoshone he plays, his features perfect for the part. Lance Poole comes back from the war fighting side by side with whites in the Union forces and winning the Congressional Medal of Honor. He has changed, thinking that the world has changed with him. He returns to Sweet Meadows, the land of his father, and only wants to build upon the land a cattle ranch. He does so successfully for 5 years until the white settlers come to homestead and he finds that because he is an Indian, he is not entitled to his own land. He hires a lawyer, played well by Paula Raymond, but she is also unable to change the laws which lead to bloody battles over the land, headed by another lawyer, Louis Calhern, a total bigot and instigator. Calhern is convincing as the lawyer who hates the success of the Indian, and plans his demise. As time goes along Lance realizes that nothing has changed and that he must make a last stand. Raymond tries to stop him, because she is drawn to him, and I suspect loves him, but the times would never allow her to be with him. She goes to him at the burned out ranch, and he embraces her telling her that she could never be with him, but maybe 100 years from now it would have been possible. The film was much ahead of its time, and I consider it to be one of the finest westerns ever made, and Taylor's performance one of sensitivity and strength. So overlooked it is a crime.

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8 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
another under-appreciated classic, 2 October 2002
Author: SHAWFAN from United States

Your one other comment on this film so far (Under the Arch) sums up my feelings entirely. Why this masterpiece of a film is not mentioned in the same historical discussions of great westerns as Stagecoach, The Oxbow Incident, High Noon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, etc. is beyond me. But of course it was made by Anthony Mann and that says it all. Those little known episodes in our nation's history in which greedy white men dispossessed cooperative and non-violent native Americans can never be re-told often enough; such as when Andrew Jackson, despite a Supreme Court decision to the contrary, conspired in the 1820s with the land robbers so as to allow those white men to exploit the state's mineral wealth in the 1820s. The peaceful and civil Cherokees were driven out of their Carolina homelands and into concentration camps. (Hitler had nothing on Andrew Jackson.) From there the Cherokees were driven into Florida and then on to Oklahoma via the "Trail of Tears." And the Devil's Doorway is such a classic tale of land-grabbing, ethnic cleansing, bigotry, and high-handed discriminatory bureaucracy as to make your flesh creep. See it.

PS I recently (2009) saw Anthony Mann's Cimarron (1960, his last Western) for the first time and read all the many reviews of it. Many went into great depth as to Mann and his career, listing and evaluating many of his previous films. Not one of them mentioned this film, perhaps his greatest! So even among Mann aficionados one of his greatest accomplishments has fallen by the wayside and into the memory hole! What can be done about this to bring back such a classic and restore it to its rightful place in film history?

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
I have a new "favorite" to add to my list, 4 July 2005
8/10
Author: jdcoates_1999 from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I just finished watching the VHS tape of the movie, "Devil's DOOR" and loved it. I was struck by how sympathetic to Native Americans it was being 1950. When judged against its contemporaries, it would certainly have raised a few eyebrows.

Also, I immediately saw parallels between the protagonist (Robert Taylor) having to fight racism against Indians on the home front after fighting for the USA gallantly in the Civil War, and African Americans who fought in WWII having to deal with the same in post war America. Again, another eye-brow raiser for its time.

Well paced, well acted, and uncompromising. I have a new favorite to add to my list.

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5 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
My Own Bit of Land, 20 June 2006
10/10
Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York

Anthony Mann's first western maybe one of the best ever done and sad to say it was probably overshadowed by the more popular Broken Arrow which also dealt sympathetically with the plight of the American Indian.

Right after Devil's Doorway Mann did Winchester 73 and a whole slew of films with James Stewart, mostly westerns and well received ones at that. Devil's Doorway should be grouped with those films as well as a cinema classic. My guess is that it is because Mann never did another film with Robert Taylor. If anyone knows why, please let me know.

Robert Taylor gives one of his best screen performances as Lance Poole, Union Army veteran and Congressional Medal of Honor winner and full blooded Shoshoni Indian. He's returned to his ranch in Wyoming hoping to pick up the pieces of his civilian life. Taylor has bought into the ideals of the Civil War. He in fact went to war to free another group of people from slavery.

It's one big disillusioning process as he discovers that Indians need not apply for a piece of the American dream. The Homestead Act which Abraham Lincoln signed during the Civil War specifically excludes Indians from its provisions.

Louis Calhern portrays one of the most loathsome villains of his career as Verne Coolan, a lawyer who apparently for no other reason than his own hatred of the red man, stirs up hatred and resentment against Taylor and the Shoshonis. He brings in sheepherders to homestead in the valley that Poole has his ranch on, knowing full well it will be the start of a range war with racial overtones. The entrance to Taylor's valley is known as the Devil's Doorway.

Calhern has an equally loathsome henchman played by James Millican who starts a bar fight that Taylor finishes. It's a brutal one, ranking right up there with the one in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Other noteworthy performances are by Edgar Buchanan as the town marshal who is torn between his friendship for Taylor and the discriminatory law he's sworn to enforce. Also Paula Raymond and Spring Byington as a female attorney and her mother, quite radical in those days. Although overtly Taylor and Raymond have a business relationship, there is a gleam in Raymond's eyes whenever Taylor's around.

Oddly enough six years later Taylor saw cinematically how the other half lived when in The Last Hunt he played buffalo hunter Charlie Gilson who had a hate for the Indian the equal of Calhern's here.

Although Broken Arrow got all the acclaim and deserved it, it is a pity that Devil's Doorway did not get more attention. Catch this very special film whenever it is broadcast.

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3 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Tough, honest, gritty and real, totally lacking in sentimentality., 3 February 2006
10/10
Author: mhall-17 from United States

I saw this film as a teenager and immediately recognized it as the real thing. This movie had more atomic weight in its characters,setting, plot and theme than most other films of its time (and the year 1950 was indeed a most impressive time for westerns). Its frank and honest treatment of racism and injustice rang true from beginning to end. Taylor was ,as usual, a tough and gritty hero with three dimensions. Louis Calhern filled the role of chief villain and head bigot impeccably.The film was tough, honest, gritty and real; moreover, it was totally devoid of sentimentality or clichés. I wonder if it wouldeven have been made just two years later-during the McCarthy era.Robert Taylor had clearly evolved from a "pretty boy" leading man of the 1930s into a believable ,masculine hero for a tough-minded postwar film environment.

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3 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
This movie clearly shows the problems of the Native Americans ever since they were conquered and uprooted from their lands. This is real American history. See it if you can!, 3 March 2006
10/10
Author: jenny6664 from United States

I made a copy of this movie when I saw it online. It was NOT, however, in black/white (as someone said); it was originally made in color, and has not been colorized.

Robert Taylor was remarkable as Lance Poole; the only thing that bothered me were his incredibly beautiful blue eyes; he should have been wearing BROWN contacts! Paula Raymond was just perfect as the young lawyer who tried to help Lance keep his land, and Louis Calhern was so good that I still hate him! The movie was historically accurate, not the story line, but the way things occurred at the time that these events took place -- shortly after the Civil War!

I don't think the fate of our Native American population can be compared in any way to that of the African/Americans, since they have come a long way and do take part in things happening here, both culturally and politically. Whereas the Indians have made little, if any progress, and even today the state of the reservations are disgraceful, and among the young men there is an unusually high rate of alcoholism and suicide.

The movie was beautifully, and sensitively written and acted, and showed no bias whatsoever -- only the truth.

I treasure my copy of Devil's Doorway and have looked for it on DVD, but so far, no luck.

This is a marvelous western and ranks with the best! It seems strange it was only up for ONE nomination,which of course it never got! I am sure that anyone seeing it would not be able to forget it!

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3 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
overrated, 21 June 2006
3/10
Author: loydmooney-1 from United States

This is one of Mann's works in progress. Compare it to any three or four of his best and it falls tremendously short. The woman lawyer is poorly cast, the story is rather tedious, in short this is a very heartfelt flop. However, Mann's camera is, as usual, simply amazing. And there is a curious lazy believability about Taylor that others have noted here: he talks in Harvardese English that is great, probably the one big feature of realism that has struck home with the others here.

Having seen it right behind Man of the West as I just did, well, not a good thing for it: There are five or six or seven scenes in the Cooper film that I have watched maybe 30 or 40 times, the only one here would be the first : the dog barking Taylor into town and the great looming shot of Calhern, wonderful introduction to his vile character, very classic. The rest of the story is pretty hokey, however, and that however is a big one, there is never a doubt you are watching one of the great eyes of cinema. Mann's camera was much more unexpected and darting than Welles, even though they both relied on more great closeups than any other great directors of their time, though Welles always loved shooting up peoples noses, Mann just always from every which side and level, and because he was trying so desperately to peel away the layers of character with the angles. By Man of the West, Winchester 73, Bend of the River, he was turning out his masterpieces and if it took something like this to get them, it was worth it.

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