Against a Crooked Sky

I'm sitting here. Watching Against a Crooked Sky, an old Mormon-produced family western. They hired an extremely prolific TV director, Earl Bellamy, to direct this thing and it showed. American TV looked like crap in those days.

In this movie, a teenage boy goes off to find his sister who was kidnapped by Indians. Richard Boone plays an incredibly obnoxious drunk. A lot of dull, repetitive dialog.

The kid who played the kid was Stewart Petersen who starred in several of these movies---Where the Red Fern Grows, Seven Alone,  Pony Express Rider----all crappy G-rated made-in-Utah movies distributed by Doty-Dayton Releasing.

Doty-Dayton specialized in four-walling. They would rent the entire theater, saturate the after-school viewing hours with advertising, keep all money from ticket sales for themselves and move on before bad word-of-mouth took their toll.

Petersen was Klaus Kinski to their Werner Herzog. He was Peter Sellers to their Blake Edwards. Fernando Rey to their Luis Bunuel. Toshiro Mifune to their Akira Kurosawa. John Wayne to their John Ford. Jean-Pierre Leaud to their Francois Truffaut.

The poor kid----I don't know if he just wasn't any good or if he was dealing with writers and directors who weren't any good. He went on to play Joseph Smith in a short film.

Here's how it could have been improved:

No Richard Boone. But if they were going to have Richard Boone, he should have been a drug addict instead of a drunk. And couldn't they think of something other than his being an old prospector?
 
If the Indians weren't going to be played by actual Indians, they should have been played by Italians and they should have spoken Italian as if it were an Indian language.
 
They should have been nearly thwarted by a band of female body builders.

They shouldn't have been so casual about killing Indians. They killed several in one scene. The movie  was produced by a company called "Feature Films For Family" which claims their movies have no violence, but the two I've seen each show Indians being killed, either knifed to death or gunned down. The fact that they don't regard this as real violence makes it even more offensive.

The Indians should have tied them up and tried to kill them in some creative way, like the criminals used to do to Batman and Robin on the '60s TV show.