Last of the Comanches, by the Hungarian director Andre de Toth in 1953 introduces desonance into the western genre with an all but imperceptible retouch. He retains the cast of characters that gives the western its unmistakeable flavor, without regard for the destinies that are preordained for each such type in the Holy book of America's southern woods. The result is a free play that develops between rigidly molded types, a humorous unleashing of possibilities of dialogue and inter-action that continuously switches the relative positions between the placeholder of the hero function and those subject to his power, which extend from the five privates to numberless Indians to the land itself. The audience's being turned around starts when the thinned out troop of Americans returning from a defeat vis-a-vis the Indian chief of the Kansas region, Black Cloud, finds itself at the mercy of the landscape of which they have but poor information. The desert, or simply the earth, holds back its precious resource, water, playing a passive resistance kind of trick upon the otherwise heavily fire-armed party. The weapons of the battle are switched upon Sergeant Trainor, even as de Toth launches his attempt to turn tables upon the big-budget state of the art machinery of Columbia Pictures.

*to be connect-e-cut!