Ambush

Robert Taylor’s second Western after Billy the Kid, 1950’s Ambush, is an underrated cavalry picture. Hard boiled characters were everywhere in that Mickey Spillane, post-war world, but Taylor didn’t push his toughness. Lucky for Taylor and the other actors, John McIntire, John Hodiak and Arlene Dahl, they had a strong writer aboard, Marguerite Roberts. Roberts could make melodrama and romance palatable, which is not all that easy when you’re writing for a mostly male audience. Ambush is what more Westerns should have been and rarely were.