"Trooper Hook" is an engaging title, suggestive of a colorful robust cavalry Western, maybe something along the lines of those majestic John Ford numbers. Sadly, it's anything but that.<br /><br />The original story is by Jack Schaeffer, who wrote the novel "Shane." The book wasn't that hot, being essentially a cobbled together and unsophisticated old-fashioned pulp piece. It was made into a Western masterpiece by George Stevens, the director, and his crew.<br /><br />Well, Charles Marquis Warren is no George Stevens. His direction here and elsewhere is flat and uninspired. The script is of little help. After Sergeant Hook, Joel McRae, battles and defeats the Apaches, they find a captive white woman Barbara Stanwyck who has had a child by the Apache Chief, the camera-ready but modestly talented Rudolfo Acosta.<br /><br />McRae takes Stanwyck and her child on a stagecoach ride, along with various other passengers, some of them obviously derivative. (When, oh, when, will we see a stagecoach in dangerous country without a greedy banker?) They are pursued by Acosta and his band, who have escaped from prison. Finally, McRae sees to it that Stanwyck and her husband, John Dehner, who has thought her dead for lo these seven or eight years, are reunited. The only problem is that Dehner doesn't like the notion that Stanwyck has been getting it on with an Apache, nor is he particularly fond of the prospect of raising "another man's leavings." Well, en fin, Dehner and Acosta are killed and Stanwyck and her boy leave with McRae, object: matrimony.<br /><br />I suppose something could have been done with a plot like this, even if the Apaches in some ways are the usual stand-ins for African Americans. But it's a slow story with a lot of grumbling and no sparkles in the script. Whoever thought of casting the familiar and reliable, Viennese-as-all-get-out Cecilia Lovsky as a Spanish duena? She ought to be making Sacher-tortes, not tortillas. Barbara Stanwyck, a good and sexy actress ten or fifteen years earlier, looks steely. We're half an hour into the film before she has a line of dialog -- and not many after that. Joel McRae is almost unrecognizably aged and wears a mustache that makes him look older. It's not that actors in late middle-age don't belong in Westerns. McRae himself did a splendid job two years later in "Ride the High Country", under a far better director, and Gary Cooper was just about right in "High Noon." But, whatever your age, you need a good vehicle and a director who knows what he's doing -- and this ain't it.<br /><br />It's not an insulting movie. Its sentiments aren't wrong. And it's not outrageously sloppy. It's just plain dull.