Drum Beat

It's 1872. Johnny MacKay (Alan Ladd) is the best Indian fighter in Oregon. He arrives at the White House to talk to President Grant. He is appointed peace commissioner to convince renegade Modoc Indian Captain Jack (Charles Bronson) to lead his people back to the reservation.

The history may be real but it's told from one side of the conflict. This is an old fashion western in more than one way. It definitely has the scenery. Most white folks starting with MacKay are simply trying to keep the peace. The Indians are the trouble makers along with some white settlers. It's an early role for Bronson and he does some fine red-face acting. Alan Ladd is doing very blend acting. It's probably deliberate to give this character the persona of a peace giver. It may be propaganda but it works for the audience of its day. The American government only wants to help the red savage and some just refuse to be civilized.

Drum Beat is written and directed by Delmer Daves. It stars Alan Ladd, Charles Bronson, Robert Keith, Audrey Dalton, Marisa Pavan, Rodolfo Acosta, Warner Anderson, Elisha Cook Jr and Anthony Caruso. A CinemaScope/Warnercolor production, music is scored by Victor Young and cinematography by J. Peverell Marley.

Alan Ladd is Indian fighter Johnny Mackay, who is ordered by President Ulysses Grant (Hayden Rorke) to negotiate with the Modoc Indians in an attempt to avert war...

Utterly frustrating! One of the most attractive looking Westerns of the fifties, Daves' movie doesn't quite have the courage of its convictions. The core basis of the film is sound, though as we are told from the off, it features fictionalised enhancements to further dramatic impact. Snatching from a little known part of the Indian Wars from 1872/3 (to be applauded), that of the Modoc Uprising, film is set in 1869 around the Oregon-California border. Plot and story are put in place neatly, where the characters are interesting, the back drop of various Arizona locations is simply in "scope" gorgeous, and the narrative promises some boldness as the first person killed is an innocent woman and the white man protagonists are fuelled by anger and hatred. But...

Unfortunately with a running time of one hour and fifty minutes, many passages of chatter never really expand the characters. Something which is not usually applicable to Delmer Daves when he was on form. We should be getting high grade dramatic worth from the principle players, their conversations should ping with emotion and depth, after being set up as people with voices to be heard, we never get a real grasp of Mackay's inner conflict, or Captain Jack's (Bronson) staunch loyalty to his cause, or even the depth and reasoning of Bill Satterwhite's (Keith) hatred. While there is, as the historians will tell you, a severe dilution of the story to suit the white man's cause. It's hard to believe this is the same director of Broken Arrow from four years earlier! But then Daves wasn't writing the screenplay....

Maybe Daves felt he needed to better the screenplay for Broken Arrow? To show he could put down on the page some "liberal" quality as well as directing? He would prove post Drum Beat that he could "co-write" great Western screenplays (Jubal/White Feather/The Last Wagon), but here on his own he falls short. Not only does it skulk in the shadow of Broken Arrow, it also pales into insignificance to Anthony Mann's brilliant Devil's Doorway, which was also from 1950. You can feel Daves striving for relevance in the mid fifties, but he is trumped by narrative zest elsewhere, a shame since the acting performances and production quality make Drum Beat very watchable.

Visually it's superb, Sedona's various natural beauties are excellently captured by Peverell Marley (The Left Handed Gun/Westbound), while Daves proves adept at utilising the landscapes as part of his action sequences (check out the red rock rifle engagement scene). Young's score is a goodie, blending bombastic beats with ballad strains, and the Warnercolor is gorgeous, one of the better Warnercolor productions that I have seen. Acting wise it's Bronson's movie, physically perfect and featuring a shifty aggressive ebullience that's most appealing. Ladd scores well, too, nicely underplayed at the critical moments, Keith has a thespian quality that suits the role of an Indian hating aggressor, and Elisha Cook provides weasel smarts that make us yearn for his part to have been bigger.

Some have questioned why this isn't better known or worthy of a widespread home format release? The answer is that simply it has more style than substance, and Daves, as much as us Western fans love him, is to blame from a writing perspective. Visually and aurally the film ranks a comfortable 9/10. As a whole, sadly, it rounds out as 6.5/10.

I saw this for the first time recently n only cos of Alan Ladd. Been generous with a 6 cos of Ladd, Bronson n some great, sun soaked settings. Apart from the above mentioned qualities, this is an average western. I can't comment on the historical context as i am not aware. But most movies showed the poor red Indians as savage which is unfair cos i believe one man's hero is another man's villain.

Coming back to this film, it did show the native Indians in a bad light. Alan Ladd's character describing how his family got butchered. The Natives planning for a double standards during a peace powwow. The Natives shooting unarmed civilians.

The plot - A veteran Indian fighter Johnny MacKay (Alan Ladd) is appointed peace commissioner by the President to end the hostilities between settlers, soldiers and Modoc renegades. Johnny is helped by the children of an old Modoc chief who tells Johnny that it is a chief called Captain Jack (Charles Bronson) and his band of brutal renegades are opposing the peace negotiations while most of the other Modocs wish to coexist n live in peace.

One of Alan Ladd's better post Paramount films was Drum Beat, based on a little known incident from the Indian wars.

For the first time an American general was killed during the wars against the Indian tribes. The little known Modoc war was another of those lesser known conflicts as action against the Sioux on the Great Plains and the Apache in the Arizona desert got far more attention.

The Modocs were moved from a reservation in northern California to one in Oregon to share with the Klamath, a tribe that had a long feuding history with the Modoc. That was the immediate cause of the war. It was kept going by one of the Modoc's more charismatic leaders, a chief named Captain Jack.

On April 11, 1873, General E.R.S. Canby among other peace commissioners who were sitting in council with Captain Jack and the other chiefs were suddenly shot and killed, in fact Captain Jack personally did shoot General Canby. Charles Bronson in his very first film with that name having dropped his real birth last name of Buckinsky plays Captain Jack. Warner Anderson plays the feckless and luckless Canby.

The horror of that incident aroused some bad public opinion against the Modocs, not to dissimilar against to what was aroused against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor and Islamist extremists after the World Trade Center attack albeit on a much smaller scale. It certainly shifted priorities for a while in the War Department from the Sioux and the Apache.

Alan Ladd plays a real frontier figure named Johnny MacKay who as the film has him was a civilian scout employed by the army to find Captain Jack. His role in real life was not at the center stage of the film, but he did play a part in the Modoc Wars. And he was not among the surviving peace commissioners he wasn't at the meeting when the assassinations happened.

For all its inaccuracies Drum Beat is the only film I know to deal with this incident that shocked a nation during The Gilded Age.

The only reason I saw this film is because is starred Alan Ladd. Other than that, it really has nothing special to add to the 134427923459329 other westerns made during this era (don't believe me? I counted!). Sure, it has nice scenery and decent acting, but the plot is quite ordinary.

The film begins with Alan Ladd being summoned to the White House to talk with President Grant. It seems that Ladd was called because he is a famed 'Indian fighter' and knows a lot about the recent uprisings among the Modoc Indians in the Washington/Oregon area (though the film sure didn't look that that part of the country to me). Ladd is given a commission as a Peace Commissioner--to pacify the problems, not just go in and kill everyone!

As Peace Commissioner, Ladd is in a bind. Some settlers and a cavalry officer and his wife have been murdered. The settlers are calling for action, but Ladd can't just start killing Indians without knowing exactly who was at fault. Ladd's job sure looks like a tough one.

When you see Captain Jack (not the pirate but the leader of these Indians), you will not be surprised that he's not played by a real American-Indian--this was very typical for the time period. Heck, the 1950s saw the likes of Rock Hudson(!), Jeff Chandler and other non-natives playing Indians. In this film, Charles Bronson (!!) plays the renegade Indian warrior--the same man of Lithuanian ancestry who was born Charles Buchinsky! Well, at least he WAS able to carry off the role, as despite his very white ancestry his chiseled looks were a reasonable approximation for a Modoc Indian--though his nose is clearly not correct (you can't win 'em all). Anthony Caruso, an Italian-American, also plays a Modoc tribesman but frankly, he WAS able to carry off playing an Indian very well and you'd swear he was one himself. And, Mexican-born Rodolfo Acosta also plays one of the tribesmen. IMDb did not indicate he had Indian blood, either, but he, too, at least looked like a very good approximation of a Modoc Indian.

This is a well-polished and decent western with good production values. However, aside from discussing the Modocs (hardly a tribe mentioned in a typical western), there really is nothing new here. The Indians are, generally, shown as unreasonable savages and the day is saved by a combination of macho-Ladd and the US Cavalry. I am quite sure that the Modocs would have a different interpretations of these hostilities! Watchable and well made but also quite ordinary.

By the way, although the dates are wrong and several important omissions occur, the general facts of the film were essentially correct (there WAS a Captain Jack, for instance as well as a hold-out in the mountains by the warriors). There was a lot of friction between the Modoc tribe and settlers--with quite a few 'massacres'. However, by 1876 (when the film is set), the Modocs had been forcibly moved to Oklahoma and their leader hanged following the killing of a US Major. It makes for interesting reading and is actually a lot more interesting than this movie.