Ulzana's Raid

A western set in the American southwest. A group of Apaches leaves the reservation. There are about ten of them. Their leader is Ulzana. The army sends out a detachment. A young lieutenant is in command. Garnett DeBuin is a minister's son. Well-meaning, well-read, and he does not know the country. A scout is assigned to him. McIntosh has lived there for years and knows the Apaches. There is Ke-Ni-Tay as well. An Apache scout; he works for the army and knows Ulzana. From there the film is a pursuit. The detachment comes behind and is late every time. Ulzana's group attacks ranches. The narrative shows the results directly and softens nothing. The violence is explicit. That is unusually hard for westerns of the period. DeBuin does not understand it. He asks why they are so cruel. Ke-Ni-Tay's answer is simple: for power. The lieutenant is looking for a moral frame. Nobody gives him one. McIntosh does not either. He takes no side and says only what works. What the narrative is interested in is not war but the claim to understand: its idea is that DeBuin keeps trying to explain the other side with his own morality and fails every time. The narrative gives the Apaches as neither victims nor monsters; it builds them as people acting on their own logic. Ulzana barely speaks and is barely seen. The landscape is hard. Desert, rock, heat and the question of water. The film was made while the Vietnam war was going on and was read at the time as a direct allegory. Robert Aldrich said the cut was interfered with; the version shown in Europe differs from the American one. Burt Lancaster, Bruce Davison, Jorge Luke and Richard Jaeckel are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes late westerns and morally unsettled films. Who it is not for: anyone who does not want to be disturbed; the violence is hard and the narrative gives no side any consolation.