The surprisingly little seen Devil's Doorway was the vanguard for Hollywood's shift in 1950 toward a new conscience about its (and America's) mistreatment of Native Americans. Made before but released after the better known, more sentimental Broken Arrow, Anthony Mann's film is in every way superior-except in box-office performance. Mann's first Western-from a script he called "the best I have ever read"-was also his last film with master black-and-white cinematographer John Alton, with whom he had made a gritty series of late-forties noirs. Much of that dark spirit hangs over this tale of a Shoshone chief who, notwithstanding his Congressional Medal of Honor in the Civil War, finds Montana unsympathetic to his faith that the Homestead Act applies to him and his tribe. Completing his underclass status-and the film's genre iconoclasm-a woman lawyer takes up his case. Far more complex than Broken Arrow's ultimately futile issues of "Indian peace" are the questions here of racial identity and cultural assimilation. True, it takes a grand leap of faith to accept Robert Taylor as Shoshone, but as André Bazin said of Anthony Mann and this forgotten film, "Anyone who wants to know what a real Western is, and the qualities it presupposes in a director, has to have seen Devil's Doorway...." Scott Simmon