a5c7b9f00b In 1825, Jim Bowie travels to New Orleans to sell the output from the sawmill he runs with his brothers. He soon meets the beautiful Judalon de Bornay who seems to have most men wrapped around her little finger. She clearly likes him but when he tells her he&#39;s leaving, she manipulates one of her beaus into challenging him for a duel. Bowie survives the confrontation but devises a plan to sell the not only his lumber but also the family mill and invest it in land. Within a couple of years, the Bowie brothers are quite rich and Jim meets Judalon again - only this time she is married. It doesn&#39;t stop her from manipulating those around her. Jim&#39;s business interests lead to a bloody duel where several people are killed and a confrontation with local saloon owner and crook Black Jack Sturdevant. After Sturdevant tries to kill him on the trail, Bowie is rescued by a beautiful Mexican woman and decides to make his home in Texas. Barely historical presentation of the life of Jim Bowie. Here he goes to New Orleans to sell lumber but falls in love with Judalon. To match his rivals he must become sophisticated and does so. By the time he sells the mill, starts a plantation and tries to wed Jedualon the woman has wed playboy Phillipe. Along the way to true wisdom he designs a special knife made from part of a meteorite. As with most films, story details had to be compressed to fit it into a normal running time, but it still catches much of the flavor of the novel. The Alan Ladd portrayal is believable, though Paul Wellman&#39;s novel takes the saga all the way to the Alamo and the film ends long before that. However, it has the feel of a good period piece.<br/><br/>The manufacture of the famous knife is foreshortened from that of the book, where Bowie discusses the design in detail with Black, the man who forges the knife. The action in the forging of the iron is quite dramatic and worthy of the reputation that the knife .. er .. carved out.<br/><br/>The &quot;duel in the dark&quot; sequence was dramatically enhanced by momentary flashes of lightning, which wasn&#39;t halfruthlessin the novel, where the entire duel was fought in pitch black.<br/><br/>Major spoiler: The end of the film has Bowie treat the knife in sharp contrast to what happened in the novel, and for that matter, history (he gets rid of it). This may have been to create a Hollywood happy ending, but is a major shift from the novel, and from history. While I am no expert on the life of James Bowie, I know enough to realize that this Warner Brothers production is pretty limp. Instead of focusing on the man&#39;s actual exploits (and they were many and amazingly wild for a man who died so young), the film focuses too often on a soap opera-like relationship between him and some dame (Virginia Mayo)–and I assume most, if not all, of this was made up for the movie. It&#39;s a shame,the man was truly a rugged individualist and a bit dangerous–just the sort of thing that SHOULD have been a lot more interesting than this film.<br/><br/>There are a few things I wish the film had shown, they would have made it more fun and interesting. In the crazy duel run amok where Bowie is shot (which is in the film), the actual evens are even crazier and bloody–not only was Bowie shot but he was smashed in the head with the gun butt and stabbed with a sword–a sword that got stuck in him!! As the assassin tried to dislodge it, Bowie eviscerated him with his knife!! Also, there is really nothing about Bowie and the War for Texan Independence–not just his death at the Alamo but all the fighting he did BEFORE this! Because of this, the film just seems very incomplete and focuses on the dullest (and probably apocryphal) aspects of his crazy life.
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