APACHE WOMAN
1955
Directed by Roger Corman
Written by Lou Russof
I cannot say that after Five Guns West, Roger Corman's directorial debut, I was at all looking forward to his other Westerns, probably the most neglected corner of his filmography today: while he actively embraced being a "genre filmmaker" (he preferred the term "genre films" to "B-movies," in part because in a strict technical sense true "B-movies" no longer existed, but mostly because it seemed demeaning*), the Western was the one genre he worked in that never did make it into his popular legacy, plus he also seems to have gotten out of the genre as soon as he could, Westerns making up a pretty substantial chunk of his directorial output in 1955 and 1956 and then literally never again, unless you're getting cute and counting The Wild Angels, or getting even cuter and counting how he walked off his first major studio movie, a Western called A Time For Killing. Some of this, of course, we can chalk up to the fact that B-Westerns were outright devastated by television once that medium hit its stride in the late 50s, so why would Corman bother; but it doesn't suggest some great love for making Westerns, and, as noted, Five Guns West sucked, so I wouldn't have assumed he had any great talent at it, either. And nonetheless his second directorial effort (or his second credited one, for in between he'd directed a significant portion of The Beast With a Million Eyes), was another Western; and it wasn't even his idea. It'd been shoved into his face by his paymasters at American International Pictures (still "the American Releasing Corporation" for a few more months), a project that even its producer, ARC executive Alex Gordon, had been steered onto by his boss James Nicholson (one half of ARC's ruling diumvirate, alongside Samuel Arkoff), because what Gordon had first wanted to do with ARC's production arm, an entity called "Golden State Films," was a movie about robots, presumably evil ones, but distributors had kind of scowled at the prospect—in a film marketplace that had come to wholeheartedly love alien invaders and radioactive monsters, robots somehow got the snub—and so Gordon had, rather indifferently, moved onto a Western, which arrived at Corman's door with a script by Arkoff's brother-in-law, Lou Russof, who at present had no feature screenplay credits to his name. And then—get this—the movie they'd all unenthusiastically gathered together to make, Apache Woman, turned out to be good.
It was still not exactly a rip-roaring success. In fact, it barely made its budget back—it took till 1958 to do so—and today it's as obscure as any still-accessible film can get. (Apache Woman is one of the handful of AIP films whose rights are held not by any major media company, but personally by Nicholson's widow, Susan Hart—Corman's It Conquered the World and Bert I. Gordon's The Amazing Colossal Man are, perhaps, the best-known titles in Hart's small library—and she has hoarded them out of sight for years now, for reasons comprehensible only to Hart herself. Therefore, while it is accessible, it's only in the form of a pair of online uploads, and the color one looks like total shit, with a stupid perpetual logo at the bottom of it, while somehow coming in three minutes shorter than the movie's listed runtime; so it's worth disclosing that I watched this movie, that was shot in Pathecolor and matted down to an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, in a transfer from God knows where in monochrome and in full frame.**) Still, its underperformance was recognized at the time as more a matter of ARC's own suboptimal approach to distribution than anything wrong with the movie itself, which is why Apache Woman has the historical distinction of being the last time ARC attempted to sell a film individually—to be shown by exhibitors willy-nilly, with whatever other movie they happened to have lying around—rather than already paired-up in an integral double feature. So if they didn't hold that against Apache Woman, neither shall we. Meanwhile, when I introduced its screenwriter a minute ago, I was consciously avoiding speaking with any hindsight, which wasn't very fair of me: nepotism hire he might well have been (in truth, Roussof did have some TV screenwriting experience already), and indeed he's not very well-remembered and not terribly well-regarded when he is, but I, personally, have never had a bad experience with the man. From my smattering of data points from a brief career cut short by cancer in 1964, Roussof's screenplays are noticeably more intelligent than you'd expect from the B-movie corner of Hollywood he worked in, from It Conquered the World all the way out to his very last screenplay for Beach Party, which began a quasi-franchise that served as the second pillar of AIP in the 60s, alongside the first, Corman's own Edgar Allan Poe quasi-franchise. (Now, in those cases, he had co-writers—but forget it, I'm rolling.) Well, such is the case with Russof's script for Apache Woman, too, and the result is the very first actually acceptable movie Corman had either directed or produced, so thank you for that, Lou Russof.
As soon as the opening credits have rolled, Russof's come up with a pretty high-impact way to kick his and Corman's movie off. (And even before the credits have ended, there's certainly some items of interest: the credits themselves purport to be cattle hides, with abstracted, Apache-ish design elements carved into them; more importantly, we find a certain name in these credits, one Ronald Stein, one of Corman's regular composers, and fairly unambiguously the lesser of the two "names" in Corman movie music—Les Baxter was a slightly big deal without Corman or AIP—but a quality composer all the same, albeit presently and indeed throughout much of the film just having a blast with that "Indians!" stereotypical music cue that I'm sure must have some proper name, but, actually, "attempting with great belligerence to present oneself as an exemplar of Native American culture even though you are not" mirrors this film's narrative a lot better than you might expect.) Anyway, the credits haven't really stopped rolling: a fist holding a knife punches straight through Roger Corman's name before a ragged star-wipe slams us right into actress Joan Taylor's face, declaring with implied violence that'll become completely explicit within the next ten seconds that her interlocutor best not call her a "squaw," and when her adversary (Jonathan Haze) does so again, she tries to stab him. This is Anne LeBeau, half-French, half-Apache, who's chosen an importune day to come into town, whose white folk have assembled to receive a stage full of corpses that all the evidence suggests were killed by Apaches from the nearby reservation, this being only the latest in a series of daring robberies. Also on hand this day, however, is Rex Moffett (Lloyd Bridges—Rex Moffett? if you insist...), from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and he has his doubts about these attacks, while even if he didn't he's desperate to avoid a bunch of outnumbered civilians getting themselves slaughtered and triggering another bloody war when peace, however bitter he might recognize it to be, has reigned now for years. Rex intervenes in Anne's knife fight, making her acquaintance and doubtless kindling something there, even though she literally bites him when she can't stab him; forthwith, he starts poking around the country, and realizes that while there are Apaches up to no good, they aren't operating under the auspices of Chief White Star (Gene Marlowe) or any other tribe, but are working with whites like Macy (Morgan Jones), and every clue he gets ultimately suggests no other possibility for the ringleader than the one he guessed early on, and which we assumed even earlier than that, Anne's brother, Armand LeBeau (Lance Fuller), who's built a multi-ethnic gang happy to kill under a false flag so long as that means everyone is looking in the wrong direction while they amass a small fortune, except Armand's ultimate goals might be even crazier than that.
So, on a basic level, it's the usual "they'd call it woke" thing you'll run into with seventy year old movies a lot more often than you might realize (casting notwithstanding, although Taylor alleged herself to be 1/8th some kind of native). The entire plot turns on the immediate and almost-unshakeable assumption that every white settler makes that it's probably-definitely those Native Americans going on the warpath again, which isn't at all an insufficient set-up, but I did accuse Russof's screenplay of being smart, and it's actually quite curiously multi-layered and somewhat reluctant to force you down any single narrow channel as far "themes" go, partly thanks to it being content to situate its period story in its time rather than showily standing outside of it (it's funny to think about, but this 1955 film is closer to the last war with Native Americans than the film is to us), with a settler community that's still poisonous with real rather than imagined insecurity, because their theft of the Apache lands is fresh memory, so while it's ugly it's not necessarily irrational; whereas there are real (well, "real") Apache villains here who, nevertheless, are never representative of Apaches. (The movie seems vaguely aware that "Apache" is an umbrella term, too, but it's an 83 minute adventure movie, not an ethnography.) Mostly, however, it's thanks to the LeBeaux at the center of it, caught in limbo between two worlds, having diligently attempted the white way—Armand is actually a lawyer, whose practice died because the meanest white wouldn't take his representation—and rejected in turn by their Apache kin, even when Armand and Anne are also practically royalty amongst them, grandchildren of the old chief, and cousins to the new one.
One of the reasons Apache Woman is Corman's first good film is that the acting isn't aggressively deficient, which is true from any angle you'd like to examine it despite Corman's disinterest in actually directing his actors. (Probably down to director's frequently-cited shyness, it's something that certainly diminished over time, but throughout his career you hear tell of actors who liked Corman and the tight ship he always ran, but could be frustrated by his unwillingness to discuss their parts in any particular detail with them.) Whatever the situation on this set, in the form of Bridges, Apache Woman even has a little bit of true starpower such as remains observable even at our remove out here in 2025; I don't think I'd argue that Bridges isn't handily dominating the movie as the reasonable hero whose tough sarcasm and even temper runs roughshod over every attempt to rhetorically or physically outflank him (and all whilst amusingly flirting with his quarry's sister, too).
And even so, Fuller might be giving the most complex performance, with an awfully difficult character, whom Russof, most literarily, has reading Paradise Lost in between chummily planning murders, hiding his activities from his pitiable sister with the bare minimum of effort and effectively laughing right in her face, and throwing deranged tantrums about his birthright (along with anything else he feels like throwing a tantrum about, too), so the unmistakable suggestion is that Armand would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven, though it's not really clear what form hell has taken for him, because it's not exactly life with his fellow Apaches, and there's an undercurrent in Fuller's performance that suggests Armand is actively and eagerly aware that he's about to cause a war that will wipe out his erstwhile people plus get a bunch of whites he also doesn't like killed, too; and within all this, Fuller's sort of very productively half-assing "stereotypical movie Native American diction," falling in and out of that sort of dialogue rhythm almost randomly, belying all his character's declarations to the effect that he's the more Apache than the Apache are. For our titular Apache woman's part, Taylor is fine, but saddled with the most unfortunate dialogue (basically all of Rusoff's more declamatory material—a smart script, not a brilliant one—winds up in Taylor's mouth), but getting across her own, only slightly-less-intense disaffection with a world that's made no place for her, along with a self-delusion that crumbles so much faster than her obligations to family and ethnic honor do that she's spending most of the movie trying to lie to herself but, failing to do so, going miserably through the motions anyway. (However accidentally, it's a definite premonition of the Corman Poes and their usual plot engine.) More than anything, then, Taylor's simply sandbagged by a character who's literally thrown into our faces from the outset as an action heroine, so I can't even confidently declare it was deliberate sexism that she's such a ridiculously ineffective one: she has fully three scenes where she gets into an armed fight or stand-off with a man, and loses all of them, and the only time this is remotely satisfying is when she's naked in a pond and holding a gun on her could-be-boyfriend, accidental-peeper Rex, and he playfully outthinks her so as to avoid being shot. (In compensation, she at least gets a pretty awesome cross-cut struggle against the chair she gets tied to, which she does manage to defeat.)
But if that's what keeps it from being outright great, it does not keep it from being pretty good; and in case I've made it sound even modestly difficult, I mean, it's obviously not, its observations about racism and self-loathing all arising out of the easily-digested entertainment of Fuller's interesting but always-enjoyably-hammy matinee villain and a plot that doesn't necessarily have many twists (Rex has trotted out his "false flag" hypothesis by the end of the very first scene) but does have numerous turns, inasmuch as Rex can't actually just waltz right in and blow Armand's head off in the middle of the second act. Corman's style has not, I suppose, undergone a full-on quantum leap here, and we're still some years and many more films away from "Corman, underrated master"; but we are, for the first time, getting some actually interesting filmmaking out of him, popping up every now and again amidst an overall manufacture that, itself, is almost always basically adequate.
Now, there's still some bad, rookie stuff, but even that's more by way of omission: it's not even that commonplace here, but is jarring enough when it happens, when Corman has clearly not planned his sequence sufficiently; every now and again, there will essentially be shots missing from them because he simply did not give editor Ronald Sinclair the footage to make the sequence flow correctly (this ranges from as subtle as the absence of a shot of Bridges crossing the LeBeaux' front yard after Anne's had a scuffle with her brother, to as actively off-putting as Rex's first confrontation with Armand's gang where his prisoner is assassinated by a knife-throwing colleague who could be right next to him, twenty feet away, or possibly across the Mexican border for how awkwardly the shots clang together). On the other hand, the good: a fair amount of nice vertical staging amidst the Southwestern geology—ultimately leading to a mythic (diet mythic, maybe, but solid enough) chase up a rock bleeding into a one-on-one fistfight on a cliff, that fortunately serves as our climax rather than the pretty perfunctory group gun battle that precedes it—as well as a not-entirely-there but pretty-damn-tantalizing suspense sequence that manifests as a trot-speed three-party chase, as Macy stalks White Star, while Anne stalks him, that even kind of feels like it's going for something really action-choreographed until, for better or worse, it brutally cuts that possibility off. Meanwhile, there is some experiments in doing editing (on the edge of a whip pan, Corman discovers the match cut), and I'm simply quite taken with the film's neatest shot, a weird and showy piece of blocking where Armand's Apache henchmen (witness, here, the very advent of Dick Miller***) loom startlingly into the middle of the frame out of the space behind Fuller and Jones's heavily-foregrounded heads. Hell, even that very opening shot I described is good, dollying back from Taylor to take in her threatening, masculine surroundings, leveraging great emotional effect out of cinematic storytelling, so maybe it could be described as "a quantum leap" for Corman. The worst thing about the movie, visually (besides the omni-menace of day-for-night photography in mid-century B-movies), is how drywall-y some of the interior sets can look. But, hey, not in this shot:
It's got virtually no cachet today, even amongst Corman's fans, but I hope I've argued it lifts itself out of pure Western programmer, by virtue of giving such a successful sociological and psychological spin to what might've amounted to another gang of desperadoes hunted by a white hat lawman with a complicated new romance; but even if it didn't, it's still a fleet and satisfying programmer, and that's not any kind of bad thing to be.
Score: 7/10
*Apparently for a spell he eagerly embraced the term "exploitation films," and I don't know how that sounded like a good thing even back then.
**Lot of comments on that upload regarding visible boom mikes because, sure, Corman wasn't protecting for fullframe as well as perhaps he ought to have, but they aren't actually in the shot. There are just idiots all over the Goddamn place these days, I guess.
***Who's evidently everywhere in the movie, but since I didn't hear him when he was playing a white guy in town, I think his one line here must be the very first line of his august career.
No comments:
Post a Comment