Product Details

• Actors: Gary Cooper, Phyllis Thaxter, David Brian, Paul Kelly, Lon Chaney Jr.
• Format: Color, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Warner Home Video
• VHS Release Date: July 22, 1994
• Run Time: 93 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6303072755
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #255,871 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Springfield Rifle is among the quirkiest of 1950s Westerns, provocatively original in mood, plot, and characterization--but also, more or less simultaneously, a bit of a mess. Gary Cooper plays a Southern-born Union officer fighting the Civil War far from conventional battlegrounds. Somewhere out West, a band of jayhawkers is selling cavalry horses to the Yankees, then stealing them to sell again to the Confederates. After losing a herd to the raiders, Cooper is court-martialed as a coward, "copperhead," or both, then thrown into dodgy complicity with the villains responsible for his disgrace. As in his earlier Ramrod, director Andre DeToth envelops a large cast of characters in a miasma of betrayal and ambiguity, and doesn't hesitate to kill off prominent people without warning. Gunsmoke creator Charles Marquis Warren worked on the script, and the pre-Davy Crockett Fess Parker has a droll cameo as a Reb. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Exciting, Post High-Noon Cooper Western, March 18, 2006

By 

Terence Allen (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Springfield Rifle [VHS] (VHS Tape)

It would be nearly impossible for Gary Cooper to follow up his Oscar-winning performance in High Noon with as great as a Western, but Springfield Rifle is more than rousingly entertaining. It is well-written and although it has some lapses in logic, it does have good plotting.

Cooper plays a disgraced Union major from Virginia who falls in with Confederate raiders who are stealing Union horses and supplying them to the Confederacy. Little do the raiders know that Cooper's disgrace is a counterintelligence plot by the Union to discover the leader of the raiders and to find out who is the Union traitor who is supplying the Rebels information.

Complete with fistfights, shootouts, and double crosses, this film does not hesitate in killing major characters off, but this is a necessity of the plot, otherwise, the movie wouldn't go anywhere. Cooper seems more virile and alive than he did in Springfield Rifle, and had not reached the level of his later Westerns, almost all of which were entertaining and enjoyable, but saw him playing a tired, world-weary man who just wants to find something to believe in. Cooper still seemed young and energetic enough to pull off a believable, engaging hero.

Springfield Rifle deserves a DVD release, if for no other reason that to display one of Gary Cooper's last vigorous Western performances.

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars great western spy movie,1st rate, August 28, 2001

By 

mike raedisch (wellington,florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Springfield Rifle [VHS] (VHS Tape)

A Army Major gets striped of his rank and thrown out of the Army,kicked out of Garrison by his pears and Comerads alike.When the Major clears his name(Garry Cooper)he reviels the rear Croock and brings him to justice.Great western good Actors,good director,they dont make movies like this anymore