Many Rivers to Cross (film)

Many Rivers to Cross is a 1955 American colonial Western film shot in CinemaScope directed by Roy Rowland and starring Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker.

Plot
Kentucky, the late 18th century: A traveling preacher's coming to town, but Miles Henderson is upset because Cissie Crawford seems reluctant to marry him. She seems more interested in a handsome trapper who has just arrived in the territory, Bushrod Gentry.

Cissie's life is saved by Bushrod after she is attacked by Shawnee tribesmen, but he is a confirmed bachelor who lets her down gently. While traveling on his own, Bushrod is wounded by the Indians and in danger until another woman, Mary Stuart Cherne, saves his life.

Feeling love at first sight, Mary takes him home to her Scottish-born father, Cadmus, and their Indian servant, Sandak, to heal. Her longtime suitor Luke Radford is unhappy about this interloper.

Bushrod again declines a chance to settle down, whereupon an angry Mary ends up keeping him there against his will. With her four brothers keeping a gun on him, Bushrod is forced to marry Mary.

He punches a justice of the peace and gets 30 days in jail. Another trapper, Esau Hamilton, has a sick child whose life Bushrod ends up saving. He slips away and intends to be on his own again, but Bushrod comes across Indians who are trying to scalp Mary. He saves her life this time, then accepts his fate as a man in love...

Cast

 * Robert Taylor as Bushrod Gentry
 * Eleanor Parker as Mary Stuart Cherne
 * with Victor McLaglen as Cadmus Cherne
 * Jeff Richards as Fremont
 * Russ Tamblyn as Shields
 * James Arness as Esau Hamilton
 * Alan Hale, Jr. as Luke Radford
 * John Hudson as Hugh
 * Rhys Williams as Lige Blake
 * Josephine Hutchinson as Mrs. Cherne
 * Sig Ruman as Spectacle man
 * Rosemary DeCamp as Lucy Hamilton
 * Russell Johnson as Banks
 * Ralph Moody as Sandak
 * Abel Fernandez as Slangoh

Opening dedication
"We respectfully dedicate our story to the frontier women of America who helped their men settle the Kentucky wilderness. They were gallant and courageous, and without their aggressive cooperation – few of us would be around to see this picture."

Production
MGM bought the rights to a story by Steve Frazee published in Argosy magazine. Jack Cummings was assigned to produce. Janet Leigh was originally intended to be the female lead.

Reception
According to MGM records the film earned $2,084,000 in the US and Canada and $1,748,000 elsewhere, resulting in a profit of $533,000.

The review in the February 24, 1955 issue of The New York Times panned the film: “as inane, raucous and clumsy an attempt at Western satire as has snaked out of the Hollywood brush in a long time. Photographed in color and CinemaScope, for no discernible reason, it co-stars Eleanor Parker and Robert Taylor. The story tells how a husband-craving tomboy of the Kentucky frontier literally exhausts a bold frontiersman into marriage and, after what seems years later, true love.The heavy-handed writing, directing and acting, especially that of Miss Parker and Victor McLaglen, as a hillbilly patriarch, all but nudges the customer into the aisle, in poking fun at buckskin horseplay, shotgun weddings and, as a climax, Shawnee warfare. James Arness and Rosemary DeCamp are effective in the picture's one thoughtful interlude, and Mr. Taylor looks miserable about the whole dismal cartoon.”