Apache Territory

Skilled Harmonica playing, Joshua Trees, outdoor scenery, great story line.

Rory Calhoun is a loner named "Logan Cates" who rides upon an Apache war party in the middle of the desert. Hampering his ability to escape is the fact that there are three other groups of whites (arriving at different times) who are also in trouble and need his help. So, all of them seek refuge in a waterhole and take up as good a defensive posture as possible. Now, not wanting to spoil the film for those who haven't seen it I will just say that this is not a bad western movie. Most of the actors did a decent job but Rory Calhoun basically carried this film with a very creditable performance. On the flip side though, the cavalry soldiers were some of the most undisciplined and inept bunch I've ever seen and seemed out-of-character. Be that as it may, in my opinion any western film that has a Gila monster and the quote, "It's just a flesh wound" can't be that bad. Worth a watch for fans of this genre.

Rory Calhoun stars as Logan Cates who ends up helping a band of motley crew - army soldiers, his ex-flame and her beau, a young girl kidnapped by the Apaches and deserted on the plains, a young guy, and a Pima Native - and it's a taut 70 mins of some tense moments of an impending attack and some good action. There's a Gila monster scene that is quite nail biting. It never laborious in getting to the point, and you get that message from the action-packed intro. The finale with the blasting powder in the storm is really good. Typical stranger helping a motley crew story with some stereotypical characters but it's entertaining. Read the book and that was a really good read.

In a very tightly constructed and entertaining B Western that he produced as well as starred in, Rory Calhoun collects a motley crew of people to stand off hostile Apaches in Apache Territory. The title speaks for itself, but it begs the question as to what all these people were doing there?

Circumstance bring Calhoun together with a former flame and her new fiancé, Barbara Bates and John Dehner, a young girl played by Carolyn Craig whom Calhoun rescues on the trail, Tom Pittman an amiable young drifting cowboy, Indian prospector Frank DeKova and a patrol of cavalry who are led by a sergeant from the adjutant general's office with no field experience in Frank DeSales. DeSales gladly cedes leadership to Calhoun who knows far more about Indian fighting than he does.

DeSales has some malcontents among his troops, a homesick Myron Healey and a former sergeant in Leo Gordon who thinks he ought to be running things. I think you can see all the inherent conflicts and in the 70 minute running time they're all brought out.

Actually Calhoun does have a plan to get them all out and it depends on the weather. The trick is to see how many of them survive. What it is you'll have to see Apache Territory for.

If you didn't recognize it, Apache Territory is yet another reworking of John Ford's The Lost Patrol which was remade into Sahara and remade again as Last Of The Comanches. The last stand theme is enduringly popular and Columbia Pictures sure got a lot of use out of it.

Two tragedies were in this cast. Both Tom Pittman and Carolyn Craig died way too young and too violently. Pittman in a car crash after this film was completed and Craig several years later by gunshot. In John Mitchum's book Them Ornery Mitchum Boys about he and brother Bob he became friends with Pittman and described him as a nice kid and promising young actor. Pittman was missing for several days before police found the car he had been driving at the bottom of a ravine with Pittman's body.

Apache Territory is a good classic B western the kind that sadly Hollywood does not turn out any more.

Sometimes tense B-western stars brawny silent-type Rory Calhoun as a drifter who holds up with an assortment of characters (most reluctant to heed his sage advice) at a waterhole after Apache raids kill a number of their companions. After first rescuing an orphaned young woman (Craig) and wounded young pioneer (Pittman), he's joined by old flame (Bates) and her cowardly fiancé (Dehner), a quartet of Confederate soldiers and a wily gold-prospecting Indian (DeKova) a tribal enemy of the Apaches. As food and water become scarce, tensions within the group cause hysteria and various characters lose their cool leading to fatally poor decisions as cabin fever spreads.

Calhoun gets good support from Bates as his scorned former lover, while Myron Healey has a reasonable role as an initially resilient Confederate, who succumbs to panic at the thought of never seeing his family again. Leo Gordon is imposing as the principal agitator among the group, spurred on by greed and selfish motivations to survive at any expense.

It's economical and typical of Columbia Pictures westerns at the time, with director Nazarro keeping the melodrama to a minimum and the tension palpable. Apache sympathisers might be offended, with the tribe depicted simply as marauding scalpers, while Craig's nubile wife-to-be would surely irk the feminists as she fusses over domestic duties trying to impress Pittman and clumsily convince him to take her as his wife and mother to his future progeny. But despite the chauvinism, I still found the movie a reasonably taut, formula western worthy of a 70 minute pause while channel surfing.