Wagon Master

Another Fordian epic positing the American community as the sum of its bands of outsiders, with a Mormon wagon train bound for the westward Promised Land in alliance with a pair of rootless horse-traders, a trio of theatricals, and a tribe of nomadic Navajos, tested by the landscape and the threat of their perverse familial mirror image, the villainous Uncle Shiloh Clegg and his boys. A moral fable, but with a refreshing lack of rhetoric to its poetry. Athlete/actor Jim Thorpe, here playing the Navajo leader, was himself portrayed by Burt Lancaster the following year in the biopic Jim Thorpe - All-American.