Winners Of The Wilderness (1927)

• Director
  • W.S. Van Dyke
• Writers
  • Marian Ainslee(titles)
  • Josephine Chippo
  • John T. Neville
• Stars
  • Tim McCoy
  • Joan Crawford
  • Edward Connelly

  The Tim McCoy western Winners of the Wilderness was shot simultaneously with McCoy's War Paint, using the same locations for both. Boasting a larger budget than the average "B"-western, the film casts McCoy as a courageous Indian scout, determined to negotiate an honorable peace between the white settlers and his Native American friends. Though his efforts are undercut by various villains pursuing their own agendae, our hero finally prevails. The film's most startling sequence finds a nude male prisoner being burned at the stake by hostile tribesmen -- hardly the sort of thing one might expect in a film essentially designed for preteen moviegoers.