Pony Soldier

Throne Power as the Mountie hero of Pony Solider gets 75 cents a day for wages. Even though his job involves rescuing a blond girl prisoner, capturing a renegade white killer and pacifying thousands of ravaging Cree Indians--all singlehandedly, Power deserves little if any raise in pay.

In the tradition of most Westerns, Pony Soldier opens with a bloody battle and ends with a more personalized duel between the hero and four menacing savages. Between the two extremes of the movie Power spends the rest of his time looking sternly at the Indians, refusing to lot them bluff him, and smoking several sacks of Bull Durham in a succession of pow-wows.

Diector Joseph Newman attempts to pick up the middle parts with a series of hallucinations, a sometimes humorous half-breed, a white-haired Indian woman, and a grubby little orphan. The latter almost carries the picture, but his small back gives way from the strain after about 15 minutes. The heroine, Penny Edwards, spends most of the movie bound, gagged, and hidden away in a tepee.

The bill is somewhat saved by the co-feature, "The Gambler and the Lady," in which Dane Clark turns in a midget Humphrey Bogart performance. A few original twists in the plot and several good character portrayals help lift this picture from the second feature category.