Tumbleweed | |
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Directed by | Nathan Juran |
Produced by | Ross Hunter |
Written by | John Meredyth Lucas |
Based on | novel Three Were Renegades by Kenneth Perkins |
Starring |
Audie Murphy Lori Nelson Chill Wills |
Music by | Joseph Gershenson |
Cinematography | Russell Metty |
Edited by | Virgil W. Vogel |
Production
company |
Universal International
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Distributed by | Universal International |
Release date
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Running time
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79 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Tumbleweed is a 1953 American Technicolor Western film directed by Nathan Juran starring Audie Murphy, Lori Nelson and Chill Wills. It was also known by the alternative title of Three Were Renegades; the title of the 1937 novel Three Were Thoroughbreds by Kenneth Taylor Perkins the film was based on which had been previously filmed as the 1948 film Relentless.
Jim Harvey (Audie Murphy) is a guide and guard on a wagon train. After he saves the life of a Yaqui Indian warrior, Tigre, the wagon train is attacked and Harvey realises their only chance of survival is if he can negotiate a truce with Tigre's father, the chief Aguila (Ralph Moody). Aguila orders Harvey to be knocked out, and tortured later, but he is set free by Tigre's mother. He goes to town and discovers the people on the wagon train were massacred, except for two sisters who Harvey insisted hide in the caves. Harvey is falsely accused of cowardice and the townsfolk threaten to lynch him. Harvey escapes on a borrowed horse named Tumbleweed, and tries to prove his innocence, discovering that a white man was responsible for the attack. It is the horse's intelligence and instinct that save Harvey, and Murphy's interaction with the horse, that drive much of the storyline.