"I coulda been a chief." "Oh yeah? How come you're not a chief now?" "Eh, I got no stomach for politics." A rarely-seen effort by Samuel Fuller, Run of the Arrow is far from your standard western. After firing the last shot of the Civil War, Confederate soldier O'Meara (Rod Steiger, brilliantly combining Southern and Irish accents) heads west to make a new life for himself. Along the way, he gets captured by a Native American tribe, who threaten to kill him unless he can complete the "Run of the Arrow" - an extremely difficult task, to say the least. Of course, our hero is successful, and he is allowed to become a full member of the tribe. When a group of soldiers (led by the man who Steiger shot at the beginning of the film) wage war on the Sioux, O'Meara must choose between his old life and his new life.
This is often cited as the first film to use squibs to simulate bullet impacts (a squib is a very small explosive which is often worn by actors to simulate bullet wounds). At the end of the film, a single squib is used to simulate a headshot, complete with fake blood splashing from the wound. However, the Polish film Pokolenie apparently used a squib and fake blood in 1955, two years before Run of the Arrow.
Look for badass Charles Bronson as one of the Sioux!
Rating: 3/4
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