Acknowledging Apache Drums (1951) as the forgotten Val Lewton movie, we must also acknowledge that it's not quite as special as Cat People or Isle of the Dead or any of the others in the chiller cycle, but it does bear comparison with the lesser-known Mademoiselle Fifi and it certainly beats the pants off of Youth Runs Wild.
If the conservative nature of the western format reins in some of Lewton's more sophisticated tendencies, it also allows others to stand out in bold relief, and if director Hugo Fregonese is no Jacques Tourneur, nor even a Mark Robson, he's a perfectly amicable journeyman.
Admitting a certain B-movie banality, what's striking is how Lewton is able to continue his preoccupations into what might seem an alien genre, so that Apache Drums resembles, at numerous times, a supernatural/psychological horror movie, in which the horror is dually located in the American Indian "other,...
If the conservative nature of the western format reins in some of Lewton's more sophisticated tendencies, it also allows others to stand out in bold relief, and if director Hugo Fregonese is no Jacques Tourneur, nor even a Mark Robson, he's a perfectly amicable journeyman.
Admitting a certain B-movie banality, what's striking is how Lewton is able to continue his preoccupations into what might seem an alien genre, so that Apache Drums resembles, at numerous times, a supernatural/psychological horror movie, in which the horror is dually located in the American Indian "other,...
- 9/9/2011
- MUBI
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