Going to the cinema was the highlight of a child's life during the 1950's and films about "Cowboys and Indians" were always very popular. None of us children were really bothered what the film was all about, just as long as there was lots of fighting, shooting, horses galloping and other sorts of action in the film.
I did not even know what the title of the film was. I remember giving the film my own title. I simply called it "The Indian Fighter".
I was attracted by the poster outside the cinema. It had a yellow and red background and had a black and white image of a man in a "Davy Crockett style", coonskin cap, fighting a ferocious, Mohican-like Indian. The poster excited me so much that I could not wait to get home from school to ask my mother to take me to see the film.
My mother agreed to take me to see it and as we walked down to the cinema, I could not contain my excitement.
However, my aura of excitement soon changed to tears of dismay. The man on the door said that it was not a children's film. He said that many nasty things happened in the film that an innocent child should not see - I cried all the way home. I think my mother had to buy me a colouring book to make me feel better.
I have just managed to track down the film and managed to match it against the poster that I remembered getting excited about as a child.
The man, who had spoken to my mother at the door of the cinema, was right. Many "nasty things" did happen in this film that "an innocent child should not see".
However, having watched the film on YouTube, to my mind, the film was not as exciting as the poster that I saw outside the cinema depicted it to be; and not as brutal as the doorman at the cinema, who would not let me in to see it, said it was going to be.
If I had have seen it as a child, I would not have known whether it was a "sugar coated" family film that was trying to be a musical, or a comic adventure that was trying to be a violent history lesson about early frontier life in America.
So, after sixty years of searching for the film that I was never allowed to see, with only a childhood memory of the poster to go on, I will give it 8 out of 10.
