Ulzana's Raid. 1972. USA. Directed by Robert Aldrich. Screenplay by Alan Sharp. With Burt Lancaster, Bruce Davison, Jorge Luke, Richard Jaeckel, Joaquín Martínez. DCP. 103 min.
Robert Aldrich first entered Westerns with two great collaborations with Burt Lancaster, (1954’s Apache and Vera Cruz), but Ulzana’s Raid arrived at a moment—two years after the My Lai massacre, three years before the fall of Saigon—when real-world violence had acquired a weight that genre conventions could barely contain. Alan Sharp’s script refuses to stabilize the moral ground: Apache leader Ulzana (Joaquín Martínez) is neither explained nor condemned, his raid presented as a fact of war conducted according to its own logic. The young cavalry lieutenant (Bruce Davison) looking for Christian categories—cruelty, evil, savagery—finds that the scout McIntosh (Burt Lancaster) declines to provide them. Joseph Biroc’s photography is deliberately unglamorous, the Arizona scrubland shot in flat, assessing light.
Lancaster’s McIntosh sets the film’s emotional register—he’s a man who has stopped being surprised by the evil men do. His relationship with Davison’s lieutenant upsets the expected paternalistic clichés. Rather than offering emotional support, he teaches the young man to live without consolation. Aldrich keeps the violence sudden and without orchestration; it arrives and is over before the frame has time to aestheticize it. The film was read on release as a Vietnam allegory, an assessment it neither invites nor refuses.