This Allied Artists vehicle for cowboy actor Elliott western failed to impress the critics of the day and was branded by Variety as a "slow-paced program oater." The fullness of time, however, proves The Homesteaders (1953) to have been intriguingly predictive, its tale of a rugged Oregon settler (Elliott, playing true to taciturn but proactive type) transporting wagons of unstable dynamite across Indian territory with the help of conscripted Army prisoners anticipating both Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1953) - to say nothing of William Friedkin's 1977 remake, Sorcerer -- and Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1968). In reality, The Homesteaders was a dusting off of an earlier Elliott western, The Longhorn (1950), in which steers were the unpredictable payload. Here, Elliott's play is backed by Robert Lowery (who had been the Caped Crusader in the 1949 Columbia Pictures serial Batman and Robin) as Elliott's dodgy partner, George Wallace (enjoying a villainous turn after playing the racketeering Commando Cody of Republic's Radar Men from the Moon) as the worst of the convict bunch, and Emmett Lynn, as Elliott's grizzled, Gabby Hayes-like sidekick. The central conceit of explosive cargo would remain a popular suspense go-to for movie and TV writers, complicating episodes of The Big Valley and Little House on the Prairie and the Warner Brothers feature Blowing Wild (1953), starring Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, and Anthony Quinn, which trailed The Homesteaders to the bijou by six months.

By Richard Harland Smith