If the project were not privately financed, the acting less throwback-flat, and message Westerns more in favor, filmmaker Christopher Cain’s September Dawn would be a bet for box office success. With luck, it still may be, though not in the once State of Deseret, then Territory and now State of Utah.

Shot for self-evident reasons far away from the historical Mountain Meadows, in Alberta, Canada, and based on research involving a lengthy written confession as well as period journals, speeches and sermons, the film enters and individualizes an actual “incident” via a clichéd love story. Not accidentally, in black-and-white either-or stereotype extremes, the just right 111 minutes reflect that uncompromising fanaticism is neither new nor confined to foreign shores, echoing as well the Nuremberg and later Eichmann legal-moral quandary of individual conscience and responsibility.

By whatever terms like Elect or Chosen People, Divine Right or Manifest Destiny, from at least the Old Testament on, the record has been one of bloody intolerance -- with surprising anomalies in Romans, Moors, Ottomans, who preferred co-existence or assimilation -- the Mormons/Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints being no exception. Driven from prosperous Stakes of Zion communities in Missouri and then Illinois, their leader and founder Joseph Smith (Dean Cain) and his brother slain by a mob in the latter, they settled under Brigham Young (Terence Stamp) alongside Great Salt Lake and eventually prepared to thwart President “Johnnie” Buchanan’s rumored U.S. troops from enforcing Young’s replacement as governor.

With the stone intolerance of many a formerly persecuted group, they also readied to destroy the “Gentiles”-- the reference is not to non-Jews -- passing along the Spanish Trail to new lives in the new Golden State of California. Opening-framed by memory, legal testimony and a firing squad eighteen and twenty years after the events of September 11, 1857 -- which specific day Cain elsewhere underscores -- the trappings of Western movies cross the screen in outriders, horses and mooing cattle, creaking harnesses and jangling utensils in covered wagons. Captained by Alexander Fancher (Shaun Johnston), the calico-clean 140 (or 120 or 137) immigrants are mainly Arkansans, with, significantly, some numbers from Missouri and Illinois.

First silhouetted against the sky, six armed men in black tell them to keep moving, not to camp there for rest and supplies. This unsmiling welcome from Young’s adopted deacon son, Danite vigilante John D. Lee (Jon Gries), is at once countermanded by Bishop Jacob Samuelson (Jon Voight), who offers two safe weeks. He is playing for time, in which to confer with the Elders and have favorite, oldest son Jonathan (Trent Ford) suss out the immigrants’ true designs, at the same time setting just-married second son Micah (Taylor Handley) to keep an eye on his sibling and encourage him to select a wife.

As much as the wagon train’s pureblood horses to be sold at journey’s end to racetrack gamblers -- both profit and profession frowned upon by the Church -- Protestant Reverend Grant Hudson’s (Daniel Libman) independent-minded daughter Emily (Tamara Hope) catches Jonathan’s eye. After some transparent small talk double entendres, and his gentle breaking of an untamable stallion, the young folks get around to declaring unabashed love at first sight, exchange cherished tokens, and become the Romeo and Juliet who personalize the event.

In the coast-bound laager, pants-wearing widowed mother Nancy Dunlap (Lolita Davidovich) voices distrust of the hosts, and jealous widowered Robert Humphries (Huntley Ritter) is sarcastic in cautioning Emily, who cares for his baby daughter, against the Mormon lad. In the camp on the other side, Samuelson has gotten his wishes, authorization from merciless Young and the Council to extirpate the travelers, thus purifying land and victims in blood. Rebellious Jonathan is shackled, conjectural facts revealed about the fate of his mother (Tracey Woolsey), and a deal made with Southern Piautes -- Young was still territorial Superintendent of Indian Affairs -- to do the dirty work.

Following even more Mormon treachery, only a few children would survive, one of whom returns to the massacre site for the single consequent act of justice, in 1877, the year of Young’s natural death. That patriarch today defended by his church and community despite unthinkable screen words reputedly verbatim from written records, his exact rôle 150 years ago bears varying interpretations.

Less verifiable than implied, September Dawn nevertheless does raise relevant questions of intolerance, fanaticism and individual responsibility. Not falling for the allure of epic elegy of the postcard panorama land except for a brief moon-dappled horseback embrace, more slaughter-restrained than universally but unfairly maligned Vietnam-comment Soldier Blue, aimed at more than pureblood oater and yet more revelation than revisionism, it takes its sides and admits of no in-between complexity. 

(Released by Black Diamond Films and rated “R” for violence.)