nvilar

I watched this film with high expectations, as the warmly favourable criticisms published on the media together with the viewers' ratings in IMDb seemed to unanimously commend it as one of the best films of the year. Overall I was rather disappointed. Not that I did not enjoy the film, but I thought that its making was kind of perfunctionary, not as gripping and involving as its subject allowed for. What I mean is that there was no suspense at all. Its documentary style simply displayed and unfolded the facts in a kind of smooth monotonous way. Indeed the real story which it tells is terribly shocking and heart-wrenching by itself, but it was dealt with without much passion or cinematic warmth. I think that the film is sustained only by two elements, which at least are strong enough to make it enjoyable: the story and the cast. The performances of all the actors are outstanding in this film, the best on my view being those by Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber and Stanley Tucci. Apart from that, not a specially remarkable movie. sorry to disagree with the majority opinion.

Apache is one of the first Hollywood films which dealt in a serious, thought-provoking and openly sympathetic way with the suffering of the native Americans as a consequence of the white man's expansion to the West. It is interesting to watch this film side by side with, for instance, John Ford's silent classic The Iron Horse, as we can see two opposite approaches to the history of the American West in the late 19th century. While Ford's epic production is a hymn to white man's progress and to the expansion of civilization to the wild, unexplored territories of the United States inhabited by the Indian nations, Apache is a touching drama about the desperate fight for survival of those same Indians, who were ruthlessly driven out of their ancestral lands and ways of life by the stern advance of material progress. The plight of the Apache nation is embodied by the central character of the film, the strong, stubborn, freedom-loving and nobly human Indian warrior Massai, played by the actor Burt Lancaster, who was also the inspirer and producer of the film. Unwilling to accept personal slavery and what he deems as the total humiliation of his nation after Chief Geronimo's surrender to the U.S. Army and the confinement of the Apache tribes to the reserve, Massai decides to start a one-man fight for human dignity and freedom and becomes a solitary outlaw at war with the local U.S. Army garrison.

The film is certainly worth watching, not only because of the human interest of the story itself, but also as a well-crafted piece of cinema. Apache is the first great movie by the director Robert Aldrich, who in that year of 1954 would score double and reward us with another masterpiece, the unforgettable Veracruz, also with a Burt Lancaster in absolute state of grace as an actor, this time teaming with the veteran Gary Cooper.If in Veracruz Lancaster gave as a memorable performance as the attractive villain Joe Erin, here he is no less powerful as the honest and indomitable warrior Massai. At his side, also good performances by Jean Peters in the role of the faithful, ever-loving and determined squaw Nalinle, and John McIntire as the hard-boiled, cynical Indian-hunter Al Sieber, in a role that prefigures the twilight heroes of Peckinpah's films.

All in all, a classic of the Western genre which inaugurated Aldrich's later shining career.