Pony Soldier

For reasons that could only make sense in Hollywood, Pony Soldier portrayed Sedona as a town in the Great White North. As if on cue, a freak blizzard hit as cast and crew arrived, leaving them to wrestle for 56 days with Old Winter.

Pneumonia. Shattered bones. Cuts. Infections. Flu. Ice. Sleet. Gale-force winds. The cast and crew filming Pony Soldier experienced all of it for 56 days in 1952, when they were more or less trapped by weather in Sedona ­ enduring the longest stay by any movie production in the area's history. Maybe 20th Century Fox tempted fate by filming a Royal Canadian Mounted Police adventure in northern Arizona in

Perhaps Mother Nature thought she could wipe out the incongruity and help the visitors to Sedona get in a Canadian frame of mind, because freak snowstorms hit Arizona almost as soon as the company arrived, wreaking havoc with their schedule.

News reports told of Fox hiring Verde Valley rancher Zeke Taylor to supply horses, saddles and transportation; northern Arizona native Don Bechetti worked on the film as a carpenter by day, then drove 25 miles to Clarkdale where he owned and operated the area's largest movie theater. Fox recruited 450 Navajos from northern Arizona as extras to portray the Cree.

Once on location, the crew learned the Coconino National Forest wasn't as isolated as director Newman originally thought; they told the local press that filming had to be stopped "dozens of times" because flights of commercial, private and army planes interfered with the sound recording.

But it was the weather that made the most noise. During the first week of March 1952, northern Arizona was blanketed by two inches of snow; another four inches fell on March 16. Curiously, a Fox film crew sent to Sedona a dozen years earlier, in 1940, encountered similar snow delays during the making of Viva Cisco.

It was reported at the time that the entire Pony Soldier company was snowbound on seven separate occasions, and heavy windstorms blew down the 12-acre teepee encampment three times.

Pony Soldier finally wrapped production late in May 1952 and arrived in theaters that November. The unnamed critic for New York's Cue magazine stated the obvious -- though he mixed up his buttes ­ writing that "Some of us may be surprised to see Utah's Monument Valley transplanted 2,000 miles north into Canada to provide a scenic background for this war-whooping Technicolor western." Still, he wrote, "the film has several interesting Indian village sequences, and enough fighting, tomahawking and arrow-shooting to satisfy the most blood-thirsty of the Saturday afternoon movie-moppet-mop-'em up set." The Hollywood Reporter got Pony Soldier's location right, and singled out Sedona's landscape: "Harry Jackson's camera work is beautiful, capturing all the grandeur of the Coconino National Forest where most of the film was shot." Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, usually unsympathetic toward shoot-'em-ups, allowed that the film was "a pretty good Saturday morning picture for the boys in the Beaver Patrol."

Text © 2006 Sedona Monthly

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