Apache Drums. 1951. USA. Directed by Hugo Fregonese. Screenplay by David Chandler, based on the novel Stand at Spanish Boot by Harry Brown. Produced by Val Lewton. With Stephen McNally, Coleen Gray, Willard Parker, Arthur Shields, James Griffith. 76 min.
One of Hugo Fregonese’s most completely realized projects, Apache Drums was also the last film of creative producer Val Lewton (Cat People), who died a few weeks before its release in 1951. One wonders how different Fregonese’s career might have been had he found other producers as sympathetic as Lewton and settled down in Hollywood rather than becoming a vagabond of international coproductions.
Sam Leeds (Stephen McNally) is perhaps Fregonese’s most rootless protagonist, a fast-talking gambler and gunman who we first meet while he’s being kicked out of a New Mexico mining town that’s on the verge of becoming respectable. The embodiment of the emerging middle-class social order is Joe Madden (Willard Parker), the town’s mayor and blacksmith, whose motives for running Sam out of town are civil (he’s made to leave with the ladies of the local dance hall) and personal, in that both men are drawn to Sally (Coleen Gray), the owner of the cantina. Fregonese and Lewton pull few punches in depicting the white man’s bigotry toward the Apaches—a preacher fans the flames of hatred—while also depicting the Indian tribe as a spectral terror whose unseen presence is felt in ominous, urgent drumbeats. The film culminates in an attack on the town church that rivals John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 in its gripping claustrophobia, and cinematographer Charles P. Boyle uses pools of iridescent color for heightened dramatic effect in the shadowy candlelit interiors. 4K restoration courtesy of Universal Pictures and the Film Foundation