When I first saw this film in the late 1950s, movies and especially television were saturated with Westerns, but "Apache Drums" still seemed unusual and different.
I agree with those that think Val Lewton's last film suffers from too much talk; the love triangle between the three principals is tiresome. However when the unique Lewton touches cut in, they give this film almost a surreal vibe.
Lewton was known for a series of psychological horror films made on shoestring budgets, often utilising existing studio sets. Val and his various collaborators used shadows and sound effects to create a number of moody masterpieces starting with "Cat People".
However here, Lewton and director Hugo Fregonese shot the story in a wide-open, sunlit desert location.
The set is no overused Western town with fake facades, but an intriguing cluster of dun-coloured adobe buildings including a high-walled church.
The townspeople of Spanish Boot want respectability. Gunfighting gambler, Sam Leeds (Stephen McNally), and Betty Careless, a madam with a crew of dance-hall girls, are sent packing.
Leading the purity push is the big blacksmith and mayor, Joe Maddern (Willard Parker), and Welsh minister, the Reverend Griffin (Arthur Shields). The mayor is also competing with Leeds for the attention of Sally (Colleen Gray) the cantina owner. Among Reverend Griffin's flock are Welsh miners. Oddly, the miners wear their miner's hats to the dinner table; it certainly would not have been done at the Morgan table in "How Green Was My Valley".
Eventually after finding the girls massacred by marauding Apaches led by Victorio in some genuinely eerie scenes, Leeds returns to the town to warn the townspeople that hell is coming their way.
As Leeds and the townspeople try to protect themselves, "Apache Drums" has one of the strangest sequences in any Western. When the surviving townspeople are besieged in the claustrophobic church with its deep shadows, garishly painted Apaches leap down from windows so high up the defenders can't reach them.
In Edmund G. Bansak's biography of Lewton and his films "Fearing the Dark" he makes the observation that the Indian drums in this film are as omnipresent as the voodoo drums in Lewton's "I Walked with a Zombie".
In the forward to Bansak's book, director Robert Wise paid tribute to Lewton's creativity, telling how he worked closely with his scriptwriters and was vitally interested in the visual look of his films, yet never imposing himself heavily on the directors.
Lewton died shortly after the film was mad; he was only 46. Even today, those that have never heard of Val Lewton would have to agree that "Apache Drums" is anything but a run-of-the-mill Western.
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