Powerful

Let's be realistic.

Fantastic!

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Only the Valiant falls into the category of "typical western". I don't have anything against westerns, but the ones I like have more substance than just "Cowboys versus Indians". Unfortunately, even with an interesting premise, the movie doesn't really explore much more than the game played by millions of little boys.Gregory Peck is involved in a love triangle. He loves Barbara Peyton, but so does Gig Young, and while both men are in the army, Gig Young is much better liked by the other troops and officers. Greg is signed up for a dangerous assignment, but at the last minute, his superior officer orders him to tell Gig Young to take his place. Gig is killed, and everyone holds Greg responsible, thinking he made the switch on purpose. He's sent to another dangerous battle with Indians, a battle he has to win to prove himself to the town, and to Barbara Peyton.Sounds interesting, right? I thought so, but once Greg gets sent to battle, I got pretty bored pretty fast. If you find cowboys and Indians fights riveting, you might like the rest of the movie better than I did, but for a good Gregory Peck western, I'll watch The Big Country.

Capt. Richard Lance is a wronged man, he's being held responsible for the death of a much loved Lieutenant. When the chance arises for him to take a small band of men to the vanquished Fort Invincible, Lance readily takes up the challenge. Picking the men who despise him the most, and the ones he feels have major character flaws, Lance and the handful of soldiers must hold the fort from Apache attack until reinforcements arrive. Running out of water and at war with each other, it's becoming increasingly likely that this is a suicide mission from which none of them may return.Some people say this is one of Gregory Peck's lesser efforts, that it be low on production values and stilted in its execution. Not so say I, in fact this to me is a far more engaging picture than the much revered Rio Bravo eight years later. Oh for sure the Howard Hawks film is far technically superior, but I'd argue that for cast efforts and sheer entertainment value Only The Valiant wins out in the duel every time. Gregory Peck, Ward Bond, Gig Young, Lon Chaney Jr, Neville Brand & Warner Anderson each contribute greatly to make this a dramatic and involving picture. It simmers along as a highly charged character piece as we have a group of men deeply in mistrust of each other, yet interestingly they are bound by a mutual dislike of their Captain. One special sequence sees Lance (Peck at his straight laced best) assassinate each soldier's character; one is a bully, another a deserter, a drunk, a black heart, a coward and on he goes, and it's here where the film really kicks on to be a crackerjack character driven piece. The violence is pretty strong as well, director Gordon Douglas is not shy to put blood on the bones of the writing, and I dare you not to feel a rush of adrenaline as the Apache's start to screech prior to their wave of attacks.From watching these intriguing characters in a wonderfully tight situation, to the blood pumping Gatling Gun finale, this picture scores high on many entertaining levels. 8/10

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

Gregory Peck and Gig Young are competing for the same girl and after Peck sends Young on a very dangerous mission, they blame him for his reasons. Feeling guilty, Peck goes on an almost impossible task of defending a fort, where they are outnumbered by the Indians. Peck chooses for this mission soldiers which he considers to be the scum of the earth and the actors that play these soldiers, Ward Bond, Lon Chaney Jr., Neville Brand among others, are excellent. The script is derived from a novel by Charles Marquis Warren who was a specialist in westerns, as a writer, director and producer. The idea of using this type of men as heroes inspired many films that came out later including "The Dirty Dozen" made in 1967.