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Ford's Cavalry trilogy passes through Peckinpah's Major Dundee to bleed one dirty American war into another, thus a reconsideration by the director and the star of Apache. Escape from the reservation, butchery of homesteaders, a guerrilla onslaught by Ulzana (Joaquín Martínez) and his braves. The military response pushes the young officer (Bruce Davison) out of West Point and into the Arizona wilderness, the seasoned scout (Burt Lancaster) brings Indian expertise as well as a weariness of combat horrors. "Remember the rules, lieutenant. The first one to make a mistake gets to buryin' some people." A battered desert dotted with scorched farms and strewn innards, Robert Aldrich's most unforgiving system of shocks. The ferocious tone is stated early in a stunning passage: A pioneer's wife and her son are escorted by a trooper when Apaches ride up, she cries for help and he puts a bullet in her head before turning the revolver on himself (a swift close-up reveals smoke rising from the corpse's mouth), the marauders must make do with tossing the soldier's carved heart around. (A cruel sense of humor, "nothing you'd recognize," it includes the bugle call that beckons the besieged farmer to his grisly demise.) Figures on a yellow field, half Catlin canvas and half Jancsó puszta. The education of a minister's son doesn't mean much to the sun-burned sergeant (Richard Jaeckel) who's seen the human toll of foolish orders, the indigenous tracker (Jorge Luke) has a blunter view, neither side has a monopoly on savagery when the taking of power is a common thread. "Kind of confuses the issue, don't it?" The Aldrich annihilation awaits at the end, one last cigarette rolled in the rocky void. Hill in Geronimo takes a different tack with the tragedy. Cinematography by Joseph Biroc. With Douglass Watson, Lloyd Bochner, Karl Swenson, Dran Hamilton, John Pierce, Gladys Holland, and Richard Bull.
--- Fernando F. Croce |