The Glory Trail

Writer John Thomas Neville did his homework and was well acquainted with the history of Red Cloud's War, along the Bozeman Trail in 1866. His story and screenplay incorporate events and the names of both places and people involved in the fight near Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming, but much of the script focuses not on history, but on the romance of protagonist Tom Keene and the leading lady, Joan Barclay. Various melodramatic sub-themes, including the tragic deaths of two characters, are likewise in the foreground.

Whether producer E. B. Derr of Crescent Pictures commissioned Mr. Neville to write fictionalized accounts of occurrences in American history, or whether he bought the first script, liked it, and then decided to produce a whole series of eight historical romances starring Tom Keene is uncertain.

Mr. Keene had successfully headlined western features and had been the romantic lead in other types of pictures. The Crescent series takes a midway approach between the two. THE GLORY TRAIL, directed by Lynn Shores, is not a Saturday matinee western, although the story is set in the West and involves a struggle between Red Cloud and the Cavalry. It is, rather, a complicated tale of a Confederate officer - still attired in uniform after the War - who leads a group of his men to a new life along the Bozeman Trail, becoming romantically involved with the Cavalry commander's lovely daughter and trying to stop a massacre stirred up by a treacherous individual.

Tom Keene, Joan Barclay, and James Bush perform well with the material offered. Mr. Derr and Mr. Neville set out to do a different sort of series, and in this they succeeded, THE GLORY TRAIL being their first release.