THE PRAIRIE. Edward F. Finney Productions / Screen Guild, 1947. Lenore Aubert, Alan Baxter, Russ Vincent, Chief Thundercloud, Chief Yowlachi, Jay Silverheels. Screenplay by Arthur St. Claire, from the novel by James Fenimore Cooper. Directed by Frank Wisbar.

   Sometimes they do things in B-movies that seem avant-garde when they were probably merely necessary, but this time I’m not so sure. I mean, why would anyone try to make a movie about a wagon train headed West without enough money to even shoot it outdoors? Not unless they were plain-damn crazy — or, as the Indians in old Westerns put it: Touched by the Sun.

   I think this is the case with The Prairie. Director Frank Wisbar (or Wysbar) was one of those German filmmakers who fled the Reich and ended up making films in the U.S. though he never achieved the success of Fritz Lang or Billy Wilder, or even the cult status of Edgar Ulmer. He’s remembered (if at all) for making Fahrmann Maria in Germany, with striking imagery of Death on horseback dressed in SS regalia, then re-making it at PRC as Strangler of the Swamp.

   And then there’s The Prairie, and one can almost see Wisbar stepping up to the challenge of transforming Cooper’s sagebrush saga into a visual metaphor, evoking not the wide vistas of the West, but the cramped psyches of the emigrants with tight, claustrophobic compositions.

   Well it almost works. There’s a fine sense of sexual tension as Lenore Aubert is taken into the mostly-male wagon train after her family is wiped out in a buffalo stampede (done with silent-movie stock-footage superimposed over studio sets!) followed by jealousy, murder, and a grim comeuppance for the killer, but even the earnest playing of all concerned can’t make it quite convincing.

   What is convincing is Wisbar’s commitment to painting an allegory. After a while, the fakey sets take on a painterly quality, like stylized representations, almost lifting the film into a realm one seldom sees outside an art film. It doesn’t really work, but I marveled at Wisbar’s artistic daring in even trying it.

   And I’ll add as a post-script that Ms. Aubert is fondly remembered by her legions of fans as the femme fatale in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.