Luke
stu-kicks
CibbuanoApache
October 9th 2006 06:46
Apache (1954)
In 1954, former acrobat Burt Lancaster was on the up and up... he was fresh out from the critical and commercial hit 'From Here To Eternity' and was looking to expand his range and build on the kudos he was gaining for his impressive and iconic performances. So, naturally, he decided to play an tragic Indian hero in 'Apache', a revisionist western loosely based on the real-life story of Masai - one of the last Apache warriors, who made a final desperate bid for freedom and escaped from a prison train en-route to a reservation.
When I say 'revisionist' western, I mean that it was sympathetic to the plight of native americans... 'Apache' is still very much a Hollywood western. Lancaster plays Masai as the 'noble savage', complete with black wig and brown body paint. The film means well but it hasn't dated too well, coming as it has long, long before the advent of PC-cinema. It's a very sterile and conservative brand of liberalism that feeds this film's valiant attempts to show the other side of the West.
Masai is apparently the last of the Apache indians, and he spends most of the film as a man very much on his own, railing against the white authorities every bit as much as he does the other Indian characters in the film (including Charles Bronson, in an early supporting role). Masai is always on the run and hunted like he was little more than an animal.
As it stands, the film isn't bad - it's nice to see a Native American-western in all it's 50s technicolour glory, and the film is packed full of exciting action sequences (thanks to Lancaster's fabled physical prowess - here he plays Masai as a near-swashbuckling man of action) and some nice direction from Aldrich.
The film's ending remains controversial today - Lancaster and director Robert Aldrich had shot a rather downbeat ending that would've seen Masai dead at the hands of his would-be captors, but the studio (United Artists) forced them to go with the more happy and Hollywood-style ending. The film might have been redeemed had they been allowed to keep their original ending, but I doubt it... Lancaster's Apache-make up is a little hokey and the film's dissection of early race relations between native and colonialist Americans is typically simplistic and very much representative of the time it was made, which makes this film little more than a curiosity piece in terms of it's political and thematic substance. One for Lancaster or western fans.
TRIVIA: The real-life Masai was a murderer, a thief and a rapist - pretty far removed from the heroic figure that Lancaster plays.
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Comment by Chantal
Comment by Luke
Old Movies
Cane Toad Warrior
Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
Totally agree it has nothing to do with the real man, much like Schindler's List or Braveheart.