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Fantastic!

Best movie ever!

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Blistering performances.

Burt Lancaster did a trio of excellent westerns in the late 70s, including Lawman and Valdez is Coming. Of the three, Ulzana's Raid is the best; it ranks as one of the best and most realistic westerns ever made. It's not for the faint of heart, director Aldrich and screenwriter Alan Sharp make no bones about how brutal and terrifying the Indian wars of the Southwest were on both sides. Lancaster is superb as McIntosh the hard-bitten Indian scout, and is ably supported by old pro Richard Jaeckel and Bruce Davison as callow, inexperienced Lt. DeBuin. If you like westerns and you're a history buff, you'll enjoy this movie immensely. It's very well made and true to history.

Ulzana's Raid is a pretty efficient period piece about the horrors of the Indian Wars. It tells the tale of a young lieutenant Garnett DeBuin (Bruce Davison) as he is given the command to track and apprehend a small Apache war party, which has left the reservation led by their leader Ulzana (Joaquín Martínez). With him he has a veteran tracker and army scout McIntosh (Burt Lancaster).The star power of Lancaster, and to a lesser degree Martínez and Davison, cannot be denied. He is a classic gruff and tainted hero of American Wild West, shaded by life, but still willing to travel to the ends of the Earth for the right cause. Ulzana is also an intimidating figure, though given a pretty stereotypical treatment as the savage Indian, but at least they made him calculating and intelligent. DeBuin is the focus character, through whom we experience the story, and it's nice to see him growing from a total greenhorn into an actual officer.Unfortunately the story is extremely dull. Some might call it classic, I call it stereotypical and predictable. Nothing new is tried, it's merely old scenes and tricks after another. I could have told you how the story's going to end after the first five minutes.The pacing is also agonizingly slow and the dialogues are not interesting enough to give our characters any depth. Partly this is because of the time period and the conventions of the genre, but mostly it's just weak script.Ulzana's Raid is not the worst western I've seen, but it epitomizes all the things that I don't like about the genre. It's slow, formula-driven and ultimately pretty uninteresting.

Ulzana's Raid is war games out in the deserts of the old American West that happens to have been stretched to the length of a hundred and three minutes, a film depicting the battle between two sides vying for a territory more than it is any sort of enveloped narrative or intense character study. Imagine a team based game of Monopoly with packed groups of people on either side contesting a vaster, more open board but with the competitor's life on the line instead of large amounts of fictitious money. While we're on the subject, imagine the barren, sandy states of the American frontier as one large chess board wherein varying soldiers and troops of varying ability and rank capable only of particular things that come naturally to them move around the game zone vying for victory. While the film is essentially a series of sequences dedicated to tracking and moving and trying to work one's opponent out, veteran director Robert Aldrich just happens to have made it as gripping as it is. The respective sides in this case are, somewhat originally, the cowboys and the Indians; members of a Union Army, of whom have employed an elderly tracker who's seen one too many examples of what the Indians are capable of, and the indigenous Apaches – a group led by a notoriously savage chief whose barbarism and hatred for the whites that have settled is equal only to his love for this once pure land. Shrouded in darkness, our introduction to these Apache people paints a worryingly bleak picture as to what folk will come up against, when these horrifically scarred and robotically inclined beings raid a ranch and make off with a far more human-a looking white man's horses. The antagonist in this case is the titular Ulzana (Martinez), the man leading these people; a brutal man, not a thief or a cutthroat out of nature but out of the application of colonisation to his land, a savage man but only through war.Cut to the bright, welcoming daylight of a baseball match being played between those in the Union Army within the confines of their outpost. Things are cheerier and more upbeat, especially now that we've moved away from those 'nasty' Apaches and their night-set shenanigans. A young lieutenant named Garnett DeBuin (Davison) does well to stand up to those rougher, meaner and more ego-centric as he calls the game, in spite of his young and angelic appearance. Before anything can get too out of hand, an American scout rides in from the wilderness having been called upon as an Apache expert and someone who's lived and dealt with them in past, in spite of his reluctance to agree to their nature and views. He is McIntosh, played with a gruff aplomb by Burt Lancaster; once a young and somewhat angelic actor himself who enjoyed his time standing up to those in his profession of a more hardened nature, particularly in early films such as "The Killers". Here to deal with the threat of Ulzana, McIntosh offers a stern warning to those eventually charged with chipping in with him that Ulzana is a vicious, merciless man. Indeed, "Half of everything he says is a lie, the other half just 'aint true" is the parting shot issued by the scout on Ulzana. The body of the film is this platoon of gunmen on horseback navigating the terrain in search of Ulzana and his men. The titular Indian knows he's being tracked by this group; the army don't know where he's heading and considering just how violent Ulzana can be in his recent attacks against white settlers, there is a sense of the whole thing being one giant race against time as settlers lives remain in danger. Internal clashes between McIntosh and DeBuin see two men disagree over whether some kind of truce can be formed between the whites and the natives, McIntosh's worn dress; elderly composition and rough talking tone is manufactured to be seen as the epitome of old, politically incorrect and 'wrong' headed thinking when stood beside DeBuin's younger, fresher and more broadly minded uniformed soldier. It is unfortunate, then, that the duality inherent in these two men is eventually sidestepped for an all-out war one could accuse of being episodic, but there is enough of a grip on the audience and is never one worn out by its nature in this regard.If I was surprised by how gripping the film was, given its approach, to depict a series of tracking; talking; stopping and planning, then I was even more surprised by often how tough-a film this is. Make no mistake, the scenes involving the brutality that Ulzana inflicts upon the people of the terrain are often startling and it is indeed a sorry state of affairs when we realise just how watered down mainstream cinema has become in an era of genre hybridisation and big-business that drives American genre films of the modern day. At least in the era of Ulzana's Raid, violence and solid depictions of the old west in general could make its way into a mainstream piece because the mainstream were predominantly adult. Synonymous with the death of the Western genre (because it's tough to 'vamp up' a Western with cartoonified narrative elements and numerous sub-genres) is the death of films made by adults FOR adults, replaced by frat/fan-boy driven financial opportunists who produce cinematic stinkers in a set genre for people of similar ilk. Perhaps Ulzana's Raid is a bit episodic; perhaps it isn't much more than an exploitation film and maybe it wasn't immune to criticisms of it being mainstream upon release, but it's a sure-sight better than what we get now.

Nobody can accuse the writer (Alan Sharp) or the director (Robert Aldrich) of an excess of political correctness in this movie. The Chiracahua Apache Ulzana and his dozen or so followers are pretty brutal characters. They torture captives, rape women, mutilate the dead bodies of their enemies and are generally pitiless.As a matter of historical fact, the Indians of the high plains and the Southwest didn't fight according to the rules of fair play that governed Western armies. I don't know about rape. The ethnographies are too genteel to get into it. But the Apache in particular were given to deboning some prisoners beginning with the fingertips. And not just the warriors. The Mojave men turned their wounded captives over to the women, who REALLY knew how to deal with them. But let me get off that subject because it's beginning to remind me of my marriage.Ulzana is dissatisfied with the treatment his tribe is receiving on the reservation so he leads his band off on a series of raids, pursued by a green lieutenant (Davison), a detail of cavalry troopers, Burt Lancaster as the weary scout, and Jorge Luke as the reformed Apache guide. So far, so routine.But this is fairly well done. The renegade Indians may be savage but the troopers show that they can mutilate bodies too. And the inexperienced but well-meaning lieutenant reveals some subtle expressions of prejudice against a different race or, more accurately, a different culture. The script doesn't justify or explain the difference between the cavalry and the Indians. Rather, it describes them, and with reasonable accuracy. For instance, the Apache are shown as especially adept at fighting on foot, which was the case.Lancaster doesn't seem to put much into the role, a little surprising given his social and political leanings. Bruce Davison as the lieutenant is quite good. It's too bad he looks fourteen years old because he delivers his lines well and has the properly innocent features. But his voice cracks, a little like Jimmy Stewart's, as if he were pubescent, and his frame is diminutive.As usual, it's nice to see Richard Jaeckel in uniform again. Here -- grown a bit more husky with age -- he is top sergeant of Davison's detail. I do wish the poor guy could be promoted, maybe get a commission. He began as a mere Marine private in "Guadalcanal Diary" and had only made sergeant in the US Army by "The Dirty Dozen", a quarter of a century later. Now, five years after that, he's stuck in grade, but I understand he was finally retired as Warrant Officer and now lives in Coronado, California, where he spend his time cursing sea gulls and writing angry letters to the San Diego Union-Tribune about the deep need of Americans for more war in order to speed up promotions.This film isn't a masterpiece but the photography is nice, the action abundant, and the objectivity pronounced. If it isn't politically correct, at least it's not obvious propaganda like the Westerns of the 30s or "Stagecoach" or "Little Big Man." Polemics get tiresome and dated. This one opts for stimulating thought instead of binary emotions. As Lancaster's character puts it, "We'd be better off thinking' instead of hatin'." But the point is usually made with more subtlety.