Ulzana's Raid (1972)

All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

The film is loosely based on the exploits of a Chiricahua Apache better known as Josanie. In November, 1885, with about ten men, he entered New Mexico from Mexico and ranged north through New Mexico and Eastern Arizona, killing and stealing horses. On the Fort Apache Reservation they killed twenty White Mountain Apaches, men, women and children. By the end of December he was back in Mexico, having killed 38 and losing only one of his men. He had traveled 1200 miles. He surrendered to General Crook in March, 1886 and was sent to Florida. He lived to attend the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo with Geronimo ( unfortunately, President McKinley also attended) . He died at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma in 1909, less than a year after Geronimo died at Ft. Sill. The film has some of the western cliches; the savvy veteran and the green officer; the white woman driven mad by abuse in the hands of the Apaches, but Lancaster is fine in the role of McIntosh, the experienced scout (the real Archie McIntosh served as a scout in Arizona, but apparently did not chase Josanie. The film is generally realistic-at one point Apaches are seen jogging along with horse guts full of water around their necks-but the ending, with McIntosh being sent as bait to lure an Apache attack, is ludicrous. Part of the film seems to have been filmed in the San Rafael Valley, a beautiful spot on the Arizona-Mexico border.

Pretty much up until the extreme political and social upheavals of the 1960s, whenever Hollywood wanted to deal with Native American issues, it did so with extreme prejudice, particularly in any Western in which the U.S. Cavalry, usually led by the ultimate patriot John Wayne, saw it as their mission to rid the plains, deserts, and mountains of the virgin West of what it saw as "savages" in the name of Manifest Destiny, and the name of God.But the actual history is quite a bit different from the way we had gotten around to looking at it. One such film that did a lot to right, as opposed to merely "rewrite", that history was ULZANA'S RAID.This 1972 Western film from legendary director Robert Aldrich (THE DIRTY DOZEN; FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX) is set in the 1880s in the territory of Arizona and New Mexico. A vengeful Apache named Ulzana (Joaquin Martinez) has jumped the designated San Carlos Indian Reservation, having become understandably inflamed by the mistreatment of his people by the U.S. Army, and is now on his own violent spree along the border. Assigned to track and hunt him down is one Lt. Garnett DeBuin, a fairly inexperienced officer only six months removed from West Point well played with the right amount of naivete and curiosity by Bruce Davidson, and with a detachment aided by the Apache scout Ke-Ni-Tay (Jorge Luke) and an extremely experienced White scout named MacIntosh, more than ably portrayed by Burt Lancaster. But in their long struggle to track down and apprehend Martinez and his band of rampaging Apache, a lot of atrocities are committed. Davidson is at a loss to describe how he feels about what the Apache are doing to the new inhabitants of the land, including the hideous scene of a farm family (led by Karl Swenson) who are victims of the rampage, even though this land was Apache territory first and foremost. And when Davidson asks Lancaster's scout why he doesn't hate the Apache so much as tries to empathize with them, Lancaster's reply is so direct and to the point: "It would be like hating the desert just because there ain't any water in it." Like quite a few Westerns from the mid-1960s on, ULZANA'S RAID is a very complex film on the nature not of, say, White Men and Red Men so much as that of Man, period—the good; the bad; and, too often, the ugly as well. Given the time it was made, it was very easy to read this as an allegory for the Vietnam War, although Aldrich and screenwriter Alan Sharp (NIGHT MOVES; THE HIRED HAND) don't make it so in a flashing neon sign sort of way. If there's any film that ULZANA'S RAID resembles, it would probably be director Sam Peckinpah's 1965 Civil War-era Western MAJOR DUNDEE, which also dealt with a punitive hunt of a rampaging Apache by a rag-tag regiment of U.S. cavalry soldiers, though in that case the titular character played by Charlton Heston was obsessed with his own glory, whereas here Davidson's flaw is merely being naïve. In both cases, however, people do get killed in prodigious numbers, sometimes quite needlessly.Aldrich doesn't shy away from the atrocities on either side; even by the standards of 21st century filmmaking, there is a fair amount of violence and bloodshed, some of it hard to stomach. It is, however, a violence of a qualitative nature far removed from, say, Quentin Tarantino and closer to (though without the slow-mot or montage editing) that of Peckinpah, who had always been a fan of Aldrich's work. Davidson, who made a memorable debut in the 1972 horror film WILLARD, does a very good job in his role as DeBuin; and Lancaster, unsurprisingly, gives a solid performance as MacIntosh. Richard Jaeckel, who had been in THE DIRTY DOZEN, manages a good turn as well as a cynical sergeant; and Martinez conveys a scary power to his role as Ulzana.Shot largely on locations in Nevada and southern Arizona, and with veteran cinematographer Joseph Biroc's superb depiction of the parched landscape, ULZANA'S RAID remains one of the most unsettling and subversive Westerns ever made of any era, particularly its own; and while the violence is likely to unnerve and perhaps still repel a few people, the very nature of the story makes it a hugely insightful film even to this day.

Ulzana's Raid is a pretty efficient period piece about the horrors of the Indian Wars. It tells the tale of a young lieutenant Garnett DeBuin (Bruce Davison) as he is given the command to track and apprehend a small Apache war party, which has left the reservation led by their leader Ulzana (Joaquín Martínez). With him he has a veteran tracker and army scout McIntosh (Burt Lancaster).The star power of Lancaster, and to a lesser degree Martínez and Davison, cannot be denied. He is a classic gruff and tainted hero of American Wild West, shaded by life, but still willing to travel to the ends of the Earth for the right cause. Ulzana is also an intimidating figure, though given a pretty stereotypical treatment as the savage Indian, but at least they made him calculating and intelligent. DeBuin is the focus character, through whom we experience the story, and it's nice to see him growing from a total greenhorn into an actual officer.Unfortunately the story is extremely dull. Some might call it classic, I call it stereotypical and predictable. Nothing new is tried, it's merely old scenes and tricks after another. I could have told you how the story's going to end after the first five minutes.The pacing is also agonizingly slow and the dialogues are not interesting enough to give our characters any depth. Partly this is because of the time period and the conventions of the genre, but mostly it's just weak script.Ulzana's Raid is not the worst western I've seen, but it epitomizes all the things that I don't like about the genre. It's slow, formula-driven and ultimately pretty uninteresting.

"Ulzana's Raid" is a bit more modern in style than many westerns, as it's bloodier and is a bit more grim than most films in the genre. However, it's not all modern, as there is no trace of the changing attitudes towards the American Indian, as in this film the Apaches are pretty much scum. This tribe takes pleasure in torture, murder and rape--things you won't see in a more modern western...if they made them any more. I am not sure how true this depiction of this particular tribe is true as well as one soldier blowing out his brains after murdering a white woman to prevent them from capturing them. All I know is that this made for a rather depressing film.Burt Lancaster plays a grizzled old scout. He is experienced in dealing with the Apache. Bruce Davison plays a VERY young and inexperienced Cavalry lieutenant who is in charge of a small expedition that is out to chased down and kill the Apache, Ulzana, and his raiding party. Much of the film consists of desert shots--with soldiers following Ulzana's trail. This is punctuated by period brutal scenes--brutal for 1972, though not all that brutal today.I noticed that some of the reviewers really liked this film. I found it all to be a bit ponderous and you KNEW how the film would end--only exactly how it got there was in question. An okay western but not among Lancaster's better films.By the way, although the film is rated R, it probably today would be rated PG-13 or perhaps even PG.