The Hallelujah Trail (1965)

"It's a woman's pettycoat. Charge !"
A western stood on its head, and though a bit bloated, its very bloat is of the essence. A fake epic ("the land, it all starts with the land" -- but then the geography is so complicated that 3 times we are shown maps, and in the end all get lost in quicksands, somewhere), it needs to take all epic conventions and destroy them by gouging them out of all meaning: heroism, a general sense of purpose (the West without Indian wars descends to the level of playground squabbles), fairness in Indian dealings, the overal grandeur of the man of the west (Oracle Jones, or Capt. Slater), all are studiously, ferociously deprived of their mythic substance. The only myth to survive is love -- Hollywood love between hero and heroine, redemptive love that signals that there is a beyond to the film, our world where the more mature business of organizing one's emotional life really matters, away from film's pleasant but ultimately foolish games.
Yes, it's a long film. It doesn't have to, but then it has a musical prelude, a musical intermission, and a musical conclusion all on a very, absolutely black screen. And it drags on, until film forms reach the point where they start to decompose and rot: the last charge, itself a necessary element in all westerns, becomes a drunken riot of double visions and strange sounds as the cavalry circles round the Indians entrenched behind their wagons, and the Indians are so drunk that the soundtrack is about to stop. At that point one wouldn't be surprised to see the film just stop, freeze on a frame of many irrelevant colours -- as if it just wasn't possible to go on making westerns, period. All in all, a more ambitious endeavour than The Great Escape or even The Magnificent Seven (really??).