Massacre River (Windsor Pictures, Allied Artists, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 21) my husband Charles got home from work relatively early, and I ran him a movie we’d run across on X nèe Twitter: Massacre River, a 1949 “B” Western from a company called “Windsor Pictures” releasing through Allied Artists, nèe Monogram. We’d both got interested in this film from an X post alleging that the two male stars, Guy Madison and Rory Calhoun, had had sex with each other in a parked car in front of the home of their manager, Henry Willson. The poster, who uses the screen name “The Gay Aesthetic,” wrote, “Claiming Rory was quite large, Guy was clearly feeling no pain, and that car was rocking; as often as Henry repeated the story, he obviously enjoyed the lascivious insinuation it wasn’t the first time.” Henry Willson was apparently a Gay version of Harvey Weinstein; his Wikipedia page diplomatically describes him as “an American Hollywood talent agent who played a large role in developing the beefcake craze of the 1950’s.” The page also quotes Richard Barrios’s book Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall as saying, “[T]alent agent Henry Willson... had a singular knack for discovering and renaming young actors whose visual appeal transcended any lack of ability.” His most famous client was Roy Scherer Fitzgerald, whom he renamed “Rock Hudson,” as he’d renamed Robert Mosely “Guy Madison.” Willson represented both men and women, and both Gay and straight actors, but his reputation around Hollywood was so notorious, especially his full-blown operation of the “casting couch,” that straight actors generally avoided him for fear that if they signed with Willson they’d be branded as Gay. That story about Rory Calhoun allegedly “topping” Guy Madison so piqued Charles’s and my curiosity that I ordered Massacre River from Amazon.com. It turned out to be a lot less Gay than “The Gay Aesthetic” had advertised, but a surprisingly interesting movie.

The story began in 1916, when popular Western writer Harold Bell Wright published a novel called When a Man’s a Man about an effete Eastern man whose girlfriend rejects him because he isn’t butch enough, so he goes to the wild West to “become a man.” (There were plenty of stories like that, including the fascinating 1930 film Way Out West that starred another one of Hollywood’s legendary real-life Gay men, William Haines.) It was filmed twice before under Wright’s original title, as a silent in 1924 and a talkie in 1935, both times directed by Edward F. Cline. Cline had been one of the original Keystone Kops, and when he became a director he specialized in comedies. His most famous films are the ones with W. C. Fields: My Little Chickadee (with Mae West in a spoof of David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West), The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (Fields’s last three films in starring roles before age and alcoholism reduced him to playing just bit parts). Massacre River, directed by John Rawlins (a former Universal contractee who’d made the studio’s first three-strip Technicolor feature, Arabian Knights, and Universal’s first Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes film, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror), was also shot with When a Man’s a Man as the working title, but the story was so far removed from Wright’s tale that writer Louis Stevens got credit for “original screenplay.” About all that was retained from Wright’s book was the name of the male lead, Larry Knight (Guy Madison), and the basic situation of him losing the upper-class girl he loved to another man.

The film begins with Col. James Reed (Art Baker) negotiating a treaty with Native American Chief Yellowstone (Iron Eyes Cody, a real-life Native and one of Hollywood’s go-to guys just then for a sympathetic Native leader) which will set up a four-cornered reservation into which white settlers will not be permitted so the lands can remain in Native hands. One of the boundaries is the Wachupi River, which has earned the nickname “Massacre River” because so many bloody battles between whites and Natives have occurred on its banks. Chief Yellowstone, who has to speak through both white and Native interpreters because he doesn’t know English, warns Col. Reed that some of his younger, more militant braves might not honor the treaty and might continue to attack white wagon trains. Col. Reed has two adult children living on the base with him, his daughter Kitty (Cathy Downs) and his son Randy (Johnny Sands). Randy has just graduated from West Point with an officers’ commission and has been assigned to his dad’s fort. Already on the staff there are first lieutenants Larry Knight (Guy Madison) and Phil Acton (Rory Calhoun), who early on in the film get into a quite physical confrontation over which of them will be the first to take a hot bath. Remember this was at a time and place when bathing involved waiting to fill a tub by hand with boiling water (or, as here, getting a maid to do that for you), and in this film the maid warns both men that the first one who gets in the tub will be the cleaner one because he won’t have to use already dirty second-hand water. That is what they’re fighting over as they strip to long johns and have at each other in what “The Gay Aesthetic” described as “a level of chemistry between two men not seen again until Brokeback Mountain.” But the relationship between Larry and Phil soon settles into a classic Hollywood-era “bromance.” Phil grew up with the Reeds and assumed as they got older that he and Kitty would marry, but Kitty has decided she’s no longer in love with him and instead is attracted to Larry.

Larry in turn is torn between Kitty and the film’s most fascinating and complex character, Laura Jordan (Carole Matthews), who runs the local casino/saloon. Laura is a widow with a “bad” reputation, and when her husband died she was supposed to inherit his half of the business – only his partner, Burke Kimber (Steve Brodie), tries to force her out of it, including holding a gun on her and threatening to kill her if she doesn’t sell out to him on the spot. She’s saved by Larry, who opportunely shows up and shoots Kimber in the back just as he’s about to kill Laura. At one point Larry is at Laura’s establishment when a drunken Randy Reed shows up and threatens to kill Larry for dishonoring his sister Kitty with Laura. Randy gets one shot off, which wounds Larry, but Laura shoots him in the back and kills him so he can’t kill Larry. (This business of people shooting other people in the back to save the lives of third persons they’re about to murder shows up at least twice in Stevens’s script for this film.) Then Phil and Kitty both get upset with Larry, thinking that he killed Randy. Laura nurses Larry back to health after Randy’s gunshot and the two plan to run away together, but their only route out of town runs through the Indian reservation – and sure enough, the bad braves Chief Yellowstone warned the whites about early on in the movie ride out and ambush them. They’re only saved by the good Indians led by Chief Yellowstone, but in the meantime Laura has been fatally wounded and has a nice extended death scene reminiscent of Jennifer Jones’s in Duel in the Sun. In the end Phil and Kitty get together again and Larry rides off into the sunset (one of the few plot elements from Harold Bell Wright’s novel screenwriter Stevens kept).

Ironically, Massacre River practically qualifies as a film noir in Western drag, which by the late 1940’s was actually becoming a common sub-genre; already Jacques Tourneur had made Blood on the Moon with Robert Mitchum (1948), and soon to come were films like Anthony Mann’s Winchester .73 (1950) and Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952). Laura Jordan is a typical noir heroine plunked down in the middle of the West: a tough, no-nonsense woman surviving on her wits and with a cheery indifference to traditional morality. She’s not really a femme fatale but she’ll definitely do, and I suspect writer Stevens was thinking of Marlene Dietrich’s role in the 1942 The Spoilers when he created this character. Massacre River is also surprisingly well produced for a “B” Western; they went out to the familiar Universal locations at Canyon de Chelly, Arizona (where John Rawlins had previously filmed the last of the Jon Hall-Maria Montez Technicolor vehicles, Sudan) and had long strings of men on horseback riding through the countryside. Though these may have been stock shots clipped from earlier, bigger-budgeted Westerns, they are superbly integrated into the overall visual “look” of this film. Also, judging by the film’s high-contrast visuals, cinematographer Jack MacKenzie must have had a red filter on his cameras at almost all times. Massacre River is a surprisingly compelling film, with multidimensional characters instead of the all-good or all-bad figures of previous movies (another aspect in which it anticipates Winchester .73, High Noon, and the other “psychological Westerns” that became a craze in the 1950’s – though John Ford had anticipated them in his marvelous 1926 silent Three Bad Men). Charles was disappointed at the quite obvious papier-maché rocks in the setting of the final confrontation, which he found even more jarring since the film up to that point had been quite handsomely produced and free from the cheap shortcuts that marred all too many “B” Westerns of the 1940’s. But overall Massacre River is a surprisingly good movie, well worth watching; I’m glad we got the chance to see it even if, for my money, Howard Hawks’s 1948 Red River (with pretty-boy and real-life Bisexual Montgomery Clift actually out-butching John Wayne) remains the Gayest pre-Brokeback Mountain Western.