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#703 - Ulzana's Raid
Robert Aldrich, 1972
When a vicious gang of Apache warriors breaks loose to wreak havoc, a military unit is sent to track them down.
I wasn't too impressed by Apache, the other Western I'd seen that starred Burt Lancaster and was directed by Robert Aldrich. It was a lean film with a potentially interesting premise about an escaped Apache warrior looking to return to his old life despite being pursued by the law, but it was too underweight and Lancaster was not very convincing as a Native American. In this context, the duo's 1972 collaboration Ulzana's Raid seems to subvert that very same premise. The story is once again about an Apache warrior (the Ulzana of the title) escaping the white man's custody; unlike the noble savage played in Lancaster in Apache, Ulzana gets together a war party and plans to wreak vengeful havoc upon any defenceless whites he can find. To this end, a posse of soldiers (including Lancaster as an ageing Army scout) and an Apache scout with ties to Ulzana are sent out to find the marauders and stop them.
Ulzana's Raid is a technically decent film and it takes advantage of the less restricted censorship codes to show scenes of violence that are surprisingly bloody even when considering that this film came out in 1972. Lancaster definitely makes a better fit as a world-weary white man than he does as a beat-down Apache, while Bruce Davison and Jorge Luke make for good foils to both him and one another as the naive, religious lieutenant and the embittered Apache scout respectively. The straightforward search-and-destroy narrative is supplanted reasonably well by some commentary on the nature of Native American genocide (with some decent exchanges between Davison and Luke) but all things considered this feels very par for the course as far as Westerns go. I grant it credit for trying to add depth to what could have been an extremely simple cowboys-and-Indians kind of movie but beyond that it doesn't feel all that special.
Robert Aldrich, 1972
When a vicious gang of Apache warriors breaks loose to wreak havoc, a military unit is sent to track them down.
I wasn't too impressed by Apache, the other Western I'd seen that starred Burt Lancaster and was directed by Robert Aldrich. It was a lean film with a potentially interesting premise about an escaped Apache warrior looking to return to his old life despite being pursued by the law, but it was too underweight and Lancaster was not very convincing as a Native American. In this context, the duo's 1972 collaboration Ulzana's Raid seems to subvert that very same premise. The story is once again about an Apache warrior (the Ulzana of the title) escaping the white man's custody; unlike the noble savage played in Lancaster in Apache, Ulzana gets together a war party and plans to wreak vengeful havoc upon any defenceless whites he can find. To this end, a posse of soldiers (including Lancaster as an ageing Army scout) and an Apache scout with ties to Ulzana are sent out to find the marauders and stop them.
Ulzana's Raid is a technically decent film and it takes advantage of the less restricted censorship codes to show scenes of violence that are surprisingly bloody even when considering that this film came out in 1972. Lancaster definitely makes a better fit as a world-weary white man than he does as a beat-down Apache, while Bruce Davison and Jorge Luke make for good foils to both him and one another as the naive, religious lieutenant and the embittered Apache scout respectively. The straightforward search-and-destroy narrative is supplanted reasonably well by some commentary on the nature of Native American genocide (with some decent exchanges between Davison and Luke) but all things considered this feels very par for the course as far as Westerns go. I grant it credit for trying to add depth to what could have been an extremely simple cowboys-and-Indians kind of movie but beyond that it doesn't feel all that special.