We are in the middle of the Arizona desert, sometime near the end of the 19th century. A cavalry patrol is heading out to capture—and if necessary, kill—an Apache tribe that’s left the reservation and launched a raid on white settlements, stealing horses, murdering men, and raping women. Heading the patrol is an idealistic young lieutenant (Bruce Davison), the son of an east-coast pastor, who believes “it’s a lack of Christian feeling towards the Indians that’s the cause of our problems with them.” Riding beside him is a veteran Indian scout (Burt Lancaster), who’s grown cynical from years on the job. The lieutenant wants to surge forward and catch up with the Apaches before they attack anyone else. The scout tells him this is foolish, as the Apaches can outrun any patrol; it would be best for the men to save their energy until the Indians circle back to them. “I just don’t like to think of people unprotected,” the lieutenant says. “Yes,” says the scout, before pausing to let a world-weary chill pass over him. “Well, it’s best not to.”
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That contentious gesture is characteristic of the films of director Robert Aldrich (1918-’83), one of the most complicated of major American filmmakers. Born into a wealthy, conservative milieu (John D. Rockefeller was one of his uncles), Aldrich scandalized his family when he dropped out of college and went to work in the vulgar medium of movies. In Hollywood he developed radical political sympathies, and during his long apprenticeship in the 1940s and early ’50s, he assisted such left-leaning directors as Charles Chaplin, Jean Renoir, Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, and Joseph Losey. In his own directorial efforts, he aimed to subvert popular genres with critiques of McCarthyism, militarism, mass media, and chauvinism. Ironically, many audiences accepted at face value the brutality of movies like Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and The Dirty Dozen (1967)—which, along with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), remain his best known—and assumed that he was a macho right-winger.
The influence of that movement can be felt in some degree in all of Aldrich’s movies, Ulzana’s Raid being no exception. After taking on the film at Lancaster’s request, Aldrich reshaped the story with screenwriter Alan Sharp to flesh out its antiwar message. The director envisioned the film as an allegory about U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which he’d been outspokenly against since the mid-60s. (He claimed that a climactic image of The Dirty Dozen, where a soldier sets off grenades in ventilation systems he’s doused with gasoline, was meant to evoke the U.S. military’s use of napalm against the Vietnamese.) As Raid unfolds, the cavalry’s mission seems increasingly futile. It becomes clear that the military leaders have no practical solution to the Apache problem other than killing as many of them as possible—and that their course of action has triggered a seemingly endless cycle of violence.
Intriguingly, Aldrich’s style grew more modest as his content grew more provocative. Where his 50s and 60s work teems with hopped-up editing and Wellesian camera angles, his later films are comparatively straightforward. Aside from such exceptions as the split-screen sequences of Twilight’s Last Gleaming, his directorial flourishes are replaced by a uniform tone—brusque, caustic, and foreboding—that reflects a concentrated team effort. The filmmaking privileges content over style, pushing to the foreground the contradictions inherent in the material.
Directed by Robert Aldrich Mon 8/19, 7:30 PM
Patio Theater, 6008 W. Irving Park 773-685-4291
