Apache Drums

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Apache Drums

1951

Directed by Hugo Fregonese

A gambler is thrown out of a western town, but returns when the town is suddenly threatened by a band of marauding Apaches.

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nrh
Review by nrh ★★★★ Liked 1

Two halves of this film form two of the significant axises of American horror - community as a fragile, embittered thing stranded on a barren plain; community as a shivering, huddled mass, bundled together as their village burns outside the windows.

A gambler and a pastor huddle for dear life under the bright yellow desert under enemy fire; the extended dark night of the church assault is illuminated by pools of pale candle light and the heightened red glow of the village on fire through the windows the apaches use to enter. Can't say how unfortunate it is that the circulating digital copies of this film are in such poor shape; the print MOMA screened during their technicolor series is one of the most beautiful I've seen.

Jerry
Review by Jerry ★★★★½ Liked 2

Val Lewton's final production is a masterpiece of surrealism and the moral id. The brilliant 30-minute trapped-in-a-church set piece makes Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel all but unnecessary.

Daniel
Review by Daniel ★★★½

"I like your notion, Reverend, that Apaches are just evils the Lord created to try honest men. I'm saved! I'm not an honest man."

In 1880, American Mexican settlers divided the lands of the Mescalero Apache among themselves, leaving the Apache with nothing to live from. When gambler Sam Leeds (Stephen McNally) is thrown out of the small town of Spanish Boot, he moves on, even though it means leaving beautiful cantina owner Sally (Coleen Gray) behind. Then, Sam comes across a dying man warning him the Mescalero are about to attack the town ...

Apache Drums is a Western film directed by Hugo Fregonese, and produced by Val Lewton.

This was the final film Val Lewton - famous for…

SilentDawn
Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ Liked

85

Community on the current of oblivion, cornered by the truth and anguish of western expansion. The final 30 minutes, just magnificent.

Bruno Andrade
Review by Bruno Andrade ★★★★½ 7

Continuando daqui.

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Se os principais gêneros hollywoodianos alcançaram uma grande riqueza nos anos 1950, foi também porque os realizadores efetuaram um trabalho a partir do interior desses gêneros, o que resultou na redefinição global dos seus conteúdos e numa nova distribuição, ou pelo menos numa distribuição mais consciente, dos seus domínios de eleição. O western torna-se assim o lugar privilegiado onde se analisa a história dos Estados Unidos, considerada pelos realizadores nascidos em solo americano sob um ângulo político, social e moral: por exemplo, nascimento do quadro jurídico ("law and order") e integração do indivíduo no seio do grupo social fornecem a matéria da maior parte dos westerns de Mann, enquanto Delmer Daves está mais particularmente interessado nas lutas…

Doc Lyon
Review by Doc Lyon ★★★★ 7

1st Hugo Fregonese

This one goes out to my Dad, eternal fan of the Western, on his 62nd birthday. And a Lewton Western at that, probably the perfect intersection of our interests. His final project before an untimely heart attack, it bears all the hallmarks of Lewton's RKO cycle; a brief running time and a heavy use of suspense but also a character study in shades of grey. Notable is Arthur Shields' Reverend Griffin. He's a xenophobic racist who considers the Apaches emissaries of the Devil, yet his scene with Sam on the desert (and the vigour with which he defends Sam's character only a scene later) reveals a serious, sincere soul under his religious righteousness. He lacks empathy in…

Diogo Serafim
Review by Diogo Serafim ★★★★½ Liked

Starting its social cleansing as money starts to roll its way into town, communitarian dissents end up left aside in the face of social dismantling, the civilizatory process lying in a fragile balance, private ambitions disregarded for the treating of community's wounds, a man's redemption journey becomes a descent into hell of an entire town. A church turns into a graveyard of hungry souls, constant drumming and distant singing clashing into dimly lit walls, blue light intruding from its high windows, red and yellow rays from the outer fire, minimalistic claustrophobia creeping in, scared people mourning and preparing themselves to welcome death - a true horror film, bringing to mind the best of the colaboration between Lewton and Tourneur, and I can't really thing of a better compliment to a film.

Jerry
Review by Jerry ★★★

Interiors as empty as the American way is built on hypocrisy and revisionism. Whilst the drums echo loudly through the night and the fire that burns in tandem with them inches closer every minute, are we not nudged to cheer when the cavalry comes? Images imbued with a dialectic not reconciled.

Ziglet_mir
Review by Ziglet_mir ★★★½ Liked

The season is upon us. Dunkin’ gets all its pumpkin flavors on their menu and I’m suddenly smacking my lips for my westerns to have a lil horror. Apache Drums plays as your straight-laced western B-film until the final 30 minutes where director Hugo Fregonese lights up the proceedings with a ton of villagers shacked up in a monolithic adobe church. Outside the sterile gray walls propose a doom all the settlers have feared. Fregonese does an impeccable job at blending color and shadow with the crosscutting between the Apache drums and the palpable fear from within the building. Totally worth seeking out for any of you horror-heads if you’re considering something completely outside the realm of normalcy. Only real…

Evelyn Rose
Review by Evelyn Rose 4

An Unseen Enemy. Val Lewton's final production is a horror film in all but name. It's a western in setting and characters, but its structure and staging is all about slow-building fear of unknown, mythic terrors. That's neat, even fascinating, as an object of genre study, but it's also a moral problem. The characters preach about honesty but the film has a lie at its heart: that Mescalero Apaches are horror movie monsters rather than human beings combating white acts of eliminationist genocide. To redefine Apaches as one's genre playthings isn't absolution, it is to transpose a real-world policy of elimination and dehumanization onto the cultural front. That doesn't mean you can't appreciate the filmmaking: impeccable framing, lighting, and colour. On this evidence, I certainly understand why Argentine émigré director Hugo Fregonese has contemporary auteurist partisans. But a film that conflates Indigeneity with monstrosity for settler viewership's pleasure is hard to comfortably love.

Daniel Gorman
Review by Daniel Gorman ★★★★½

would bet money that John Carpenter is a big fan of this one

sakana1
Review by sakana1 ★★★★ Liked 1

Wow did I love this. It’s a story about community, and religion, and love, all playing out against wide open spaces, and on the barest of stages. None of the interiors have any features, and we see townspeople running through desert that really shouldn’t be there, just to emphasize how isolated they are. It’s not a coincidence that this is the final film produced by horror king Val Lewton, because there are the bones of a powerful horror film here, complete with an unknown enemy, and internal tensions revealed under the pressure of fear. It’s just really, really great, particularly the performance of Stephen McNally as Sam Leeds, the story’s morally grey center. McNally is riveting here, displaying a weird kind…