Scott Simmon is professor of English and codirector of the Film Studies program at UC Davis. His writings include books on film preservation and on directors King Vidor and D. W. Griffith. His latest, The Invention of the Western Film, is available in the Museum Store.

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. Mann's first Western was also his last film with master cinematographer John Alton, and the dark spirit of their late-forties noirs hangs over this tale of a Shoshone chief. Notwithstanding his Civil War Congressional Medal of Honor, he 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 a film like Broken Arrow's ultimately futile issues of “Indian peace” are the questions here of racial identity and cultural assimilation. True, it takes a great 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.”