The Museum of Modern Art in New York is presenting a retrospective of Westerns produced by Universal Studios in June and July of this year (2026). Among the offerings is Apache Drums released in 1951 and directed by Hugo Fregonese. The picture was produced by Val Lewton, the auteur responsible for films that have attracted a cult status, B movies made on low budgets during World War II -- these pictures include Cat People, The Curse of the Cat People, Isle of the Dead (with Boris Karloff), I walked with a Zombie, and the wildly morbid and disturbing The Seventh Victim said to have influenced Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. Although these films are all directed, at least nominally, by other people, the highly literate and intelligent Val Lewton's stamp is apparent in all of the pictures. Apache Drums is Lewton's only Western, produced for Universal, about nine or ten years after the cycle of horror pictures in the early forties for which he is now famous. The movie is made on a micro-budget and, therefore, has to suggest its effects as opposed to putting lurid images on screen. The characters are quirky subverting the types that they are playing. Lewton's low-buck movies always feature wonderful photography and the technicolor imagery in Apache Drums is very effective, particularly in the final sequence involving an Indian siege of townspeople sheltering in an old adobe church. As is the case with all of the films associated with Lewton, the picture is intensely atmospheric and replete with small, but telling, details. The movie is marred mostly by its poor players -- the principals in the film are C-grade or worse Universal contract players and they are wholly lacking in any charisma. Even if you are familiar with classic Hollywood pictures from forties and fifties, you won't recognize anyone in this movie. Furthermore, at times, the constraints of the very low budget are sometimes visible in the mise-en-scene which is allusive and elliptical so as to avoid putting anything on-screen that would cost too much money. This can result in spectacular effects -- for instance, the use of color to suggest violence and chaos in the climactic siege scene in which many shots are bathed in an infernal red glow. But, in other instances, this way of filming seems overtly threadbare. The movie is distinctly inferior to Lewton's great works a decade earlier but it is serviceable -- not great by any means, but reasonably entertaining and cleverly designed. Lewton's films were typically shot in two weeks -- some of them were made on a ten day schedule -- and, so, a lot of what you see is covering for deficiencies in the production.
The archetypes are thick on the ground in Apache Drums. A tiny hamlet plopped into the middle of bone-white, waterless desert is becoming civilized. The sheriff and mayor is a burly stiff, the town's blacksmith whom we see with hammer and anvil. The sheriff with the ladies in the village reckons that he will clean up the town. He expels the village's charismatic professional gambling man, an ambiguous character named Sam Leed but called "Sam Slick", by the townsfolk. Sam isn't happy about his ouster, particularly since he's in love with virtuous local "school-marm" -- although this character doesn't teach school but instead works as a waitress at the town's boarding house and restaurant; she is, however, always clad in white or light pastel colors exemplifying her virtue and is the prudish, responsible "school-marm type." Sam proposes to the girl and asks her to accompany him on his life of vice. She rejects him. She's also been keeping company with the blacksmith who would be a better husband, but lacks the "bad boy appeal" of the mustachioed gambler. The blacksmith with a committee of town elders, including a rabid preacher-man, confront the village's "Jezebels", a company of about six gorgeous prostitutes who have somehow been marooned in this jerkwater, desert hamlet. (It seems that about half the women in this town of about 18 people are whores.) The villagers buy-out the prostitutes and they gladly depart the barren and impoverished hamlet -- it's called Spanish Boot. As a background to these transactions, all efficiently displayed in the film's first 8 or nine minutes, the Mescalero Apaches led by the war-chief Victorio are on a rampage -- they have crossed the Mexican border into Arizona territory and are hellbent on killing the White settlers. (The Apaches are depicted as colorful demons in the movie, but a couple of titles at the outset establishes in obligatory fashion that they have been oppressed and are starving; therefore, their cause is just although their methods questionable). Of course, the prostitutes end up strewn all over the desert likewilting floral corsages in their impressive Victorian dresses and corsets and the Apaches knock over their little surrey with its fringe on top. The gambler, on his way out of town, finds the dead whores, as well as the town's one Black man named Jehu; he's been scalped alive and is still conscious when Sam finds him fallen up against a wagon-wheel. In typical Lewton fashion, the film understands that what we don't see is more alarming than what is actually depicted on-screen. Jehu is wearing a beaver top hat and he warns Sam not to remove the cap since the Indians "have taken my hair." Jehu dies and Sam hightails it back to town to warn the good folks of Spanish Boot -- but, of course, his motive is to humiliate the blacksmith sheriff who exiled him and win the girl. As he returns to Spanish Boot with about 60 Apaches hot on his trail, Sam encounters a column of cavalry pointlessly patrolling the bleak desert -- they are looking for the Apaches and intervene to save Sam from their raiding party. Back at Spanish Boot, a young buck is dispatched to the Fort to summon help. The Apaches kill him and dump his corpse in the town's only well, poisoning the water. (All of this is effectively suggested but not shown -- the action is all off-screen.) The townspeople send a wagon out to a nearby river to get some water in barrels. The Apaches attack and there's a perfunctory battle. The fanatical Welsh preacherman turns out to be handy with a pistol and with Sam hunkered down in a dry buffalo wallow, the two men hold off the Indians. The climax of the movie is the siege, a startling sequence that has a running time of about a quarter of the movie -- I think the picture is about ninety minutes long. The townspeople take refuge in an old Spanish church and bar the door. It's nighttime and the Apaches attack through windows located about 10 feet off the floor, little openings through which the colorfully dressed savages hurl themselves to assault the besieged townspeople. The Indians call for a short truce and ask that a doctor be sent out to treat the war chief Victorio who has been badly wounded. The brave blacksmith volunteers for this duty and pretends to be a medic. Apparently, he's not too effective in this ruse because an Apache runs him through with a lance and he dies on the floor of the church thereby eliminating the romantic triangle. The Indians, then, set the shacks in the town on fire and redouble their assault, leaping acrobatically through the high clerestory windows only to be gunned down as they plunge down into the church. The Apaches, then, light the church's door on fire. The defenders stack pews and hymnals in burning doorway to create a threshold of fire over which the Indians can't advance. The end is near. The preacherman tells the women and children to prepare for death. Then, at the last minute, the cavalry arrives and, within 90 seconds, the movie is over.
The film is notable for the siege sequence which is flamboyant, even, operatic and has been cited as an influence on John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 which involves a similar siege of police in their precinct stationhouse. (Assault on Precinct 13, however, is modeled on Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo.) Apache Drums uses an interesting technique that I haven't noticed often in films, a horror movie trope that aligns the picture with Lewton's earlier work in this genre. In an early scene, the camera shows us a plume of dust rising over the desert -- the Apaches are approaching but none of the characters in the shot seem to notice the conspicuous evidence of their attack. Similarly, at the film's climax, the Indians set the wooden door to the church afire -- the camera shows us the flames penetrating the door but the defenders don't react immediately: the audience sees the threat many seconds before it is noticed by the characters. Finally, at the climax, the budget has reached its limit and the rescue of the besieged townspeople by the Cavalry all occurs offscreen. Once again, the cavalry's presence is announced by bugle calls signaling a charge -- something we hear long before the imperiled characters learn that they have been saved. There's a mythic element to the movie: Just as the townsfolk take action to eliminate lawlessness in their community, there is the "return of the repressed" in the form of the gaudy and vengeful marauders.
