Renegade Girl (1946)

• Produced and directed by William Berke
• Written by Edwin V. Westrate
• Starring
  • Ann Savage
  • Alan Curtis
  • Edward Brophy
  • Russell Wade
  • Jack Holt

Even compared to the other cheap Robert J. Lippert productions made to fill the undemanding lower half of double bills in a variety of genres, Renegade Girl is a lackluster production. Even at a running time of 64 minutes, it seems like those involved were grasping desperately for ways to extend it out to contractual feature length. Given the historical milieu in which the story is set and from which it draws its details, that kind of creative anemia seems almost unforgivable.

Missouri in 1864 was the scene of some of the fiercest guerilla combat and “bushwhacking,” and one of the whackingest bushwhackers of all is Jean Shelby (Ann Savage), who with her brother Bob (James Martin) rides for the South with Quantrill’s Raiders. Jean is especially effective because, as a slim blonde, she’s able to ply her feminine wiles against the Yankees in ways that the other Raiders obviously can’t. At this point in the Civil War, Missouri is coming more and more under the control of the Union, and Jean out riding is picked up by Yankee soldiers against a backdrop which sure doesn’t look like Missouri (unless she just happens to be in that tiny part of Missouri which looks just like Southern California).

“Be heap big quiet — me hunting wabbits!”

Taken back to the Union Major’s base, she catches sight of the Major’s dashing right hand man, Captain Raymond (Alan Curtis), and her heart is captured by a damned Yankee. (From the way she knows his name, one can assume that she’s seen him before, though that’s never explained.) However, she escapes and rides to the Shelby home, where brother Bob is recuperating from previous injuries, and gets him out before the Yankee force comes to capture him.

With the Yankees, though, is a “murderous renegade” Cherokee named Chief White Cloud, who is possibly the least convincing Movie Indian in the history of Movie Indians – and this despite the fact that he’s played by a real Indian, Chief Thunder Cloud (aka Victor Daniels), the first motion picture Tonto in the 1938 serial The Lone Ranger. His performance reminded me of the Friends episode in which Joey Tribbiani was unable to render a convincing Italian accent. White Cloud has a chip on his shoulder against the entire Shelby clan, and so after the Yankees leave the Shelby home empty-handed, White Cloud tracks Jean and Bob, finds Bob left alone to rest while Jean goes for Quantrill’s men, and shoots him.

Don’t get Ray Corrigan angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

Jean, meanwhile, has run across Captain Raymond, who’s out on an unrelated errand. The two of them hear the shot that kills Bob and rush back to hear Bob finger White Cloud with his dying breath. And just at that moment, Quantrill and his men, whom Jean had been looking for, ride up. Quantrill is played by Ray “Crash”Corrigan, man-in-ape-suit extraordinaire, and his performance here could only have been helped by a gorilla mask; he renders his lines as if the actor scheduled for that part hadn’t made it and so the producers simply picked up Corrigan hanging around the studio lot and said, “Okay, say these lines. Rolling!” (It’s a pity Corrigan and Thunder Cloud never play opposite each other in this movie; a bad acting tournament of that caliber doesn’t come along often.)

Quantrill naturally wants to string Raymond up simply for being a Yankee, but Jean rescues him as her prisoner, has him tied up on his horse, and rides away. She cuts his bonds ten minutes out, though, and tells him he’s free to go. Love, ain’t it grand? He instead chooses to stay with her to keep her safe with White Cloud out and about. Requited love, ain’t it grander? It’s only a minute or two before they’re snogging up a storm. Hollywood love, ain’t it… usually more passionate than this? I’m really not sold on their performance, unless I compare it to a mental image of Corrigan and Thunder Cloud locking lips.

Hee hee hee — bum!

The next morning, after having camped in the forest, Jean and Raymond catch up to White Cloud and his miscellaneous Indians right after they’ve set fire to Jean’s home and killed her parents. White Cloud throws a knife at her as she rides up, and thus introduces us to a little-known analog of the Movie Cowboy Bullet, which kills a man without leaving a wound or a visible hole in his shirt: the Movie Indian Knife, which causes the target to fall from the saddle without any visible impact.

Raymond gets her to a house and a doctor, where Jean’s unspecified wounds require that she be still and recuperate for a long long time. Raymond has to go to fulfill his orders, but promises to maintain contact…

…And then a montage of foliage out the window lets us know that almost a full year passes while Jean recuperates. The war is over, Quantrill is dead, and she hasn’t heard anything from Raymond. Hurt and angry that she’s been tossed aside so quickly, she listens to the proposal of two of Quantrill’s former raiders, Jerry (Russell Wade) and Bob (Edward Brophy), who want her to join up with about a half-dozen of the old gang who’ve turned to pure outlawry. (Fun fact: the core of the James-Younger gang, headed by Jesse and Frank James, got their start riding with Quantrill.) Jerry’s also got a romantic fixation on Jean, calling her “honey” all the time and assuming she’ll marry him, although she clearly despises the sight of him. She agrees and goes with them, on the condition that, in addition to straight outlaw stuff, they’ll put White Cloud on the top of their to-do list whenever they get wind of where he is. Oh, and she also promises to marry whichever of the outlaws does the most to make sure White Cloud is dead. She takes an assumed name for no reason except that it will help future plot mechanics.

“Oh Jean, tt’s so rare to find a girl with a full set of her own teeth…”

Oh, and the very day she leaves the home where she’s been healing and goes off to be an outlaw… Raymond finally makes it back, looking for her. O irony!

Raymond swears to find her, but a fair length of time obviously passes, as a sudden voiceover informs us of both the former raiders’ outlaw exploits, and White Cloud’s renegade gang’s similar burning and pillaging. (All of this is shown to us in a montage of footage from other, higher-budgeted Westerns.) And…

Are you as bored as I am? It should come as no surprise that, when the stalling finally runs out, Jean and Raymond and White Cloud end up in generally the same place for a showdown.

The only way to sell the story of this cheap backlot production is by the love-at-first-sight bond between Jean and Raymond that draws them across battle lines and stations to each other. Frankly, it doesn’t work; Curtis as Raymond is passable, but Savage as Jean is so immersed in her persona as tough, closed-off revenge chick that she can’t drop it long enough to show any passion for or connection to Raymond. Even by the standard of Hollywood love-at-first-sight devotion, this is a perfunctory romance; one is left to assume that she simply fell madly in love with his mustache, since that’s all she’s gotten to know. And all of the rest of the plot is secondary to the mishandled romance story, which means that there’s really not anything else to watch or appreciate besides the lukewarm star-crossed lovers.

Go ahead, make up your own caption. It’s easy!

It really shouldn’t be this hard to squeeze real passion, both love and hate, into a story of Civil War bushwhackers and irregulars. Look how easily a simple plot like that of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), say, can take advantage of the passions of the day. I can only conclude that no one involved in this production was trying at all.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 12
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0