Ulzana's Raid (1972)
What bothers you, Lieutenant, is that you don't like to think of white men behaving like Apache. It confuses the issue.
Like many would-be writers growing up in poverty, Greenock-born Alan Sharp was in love with American cinema. After a brief stint as a well-regarded novelist and television playwright, he wanted to make movies; specifically, he wanted to make American genre movies, believing them to be perfect cover for his intellectual concerns. There was no way he’d be able to carve out a screenwriting career in the UK – “it’s kind of a cul-de-sac operation” – so he decamped to the States, emboldened by the new wave of revisionist westerns like The Wild Bunch (1969)1 to take a run at a Hollywood career. He arrived with five spec scripts to his name – two crime thrillers and three westerns – which were all made into features over the next four years. Ulzana’s Raid was Sharp’s second spec western2, and the one closest to his heart.
Night falls on the San Carlos Indian Reservation. A half-blind old woman watches as an Apache warlord and his men escape with horses. The next afternoon, a cavalry baseball game is interrupted by the arrival of a desperate messenger with a dire warning: “Ulzana is out on a raid! All hell’s going to break loose!” The commanding officer charges young Lieutenant DeBuin (Bruce Davison) - the naïve son of a Philadelphia preacher – with the pursuit and capture of Ulzana and his band of bloodthirsty savages. Along for the ride are two trackers, the grizzled McIntosh (Burt Lancaster) and his Apache partner Ke-Ni-Tay (Jorge Luke), who both know exactly what Ulzana is capable of. Over the course of the film, DeBuin will come to discover the limitations of his civilized worldview, and McIntosh’s tactical prowess will be tested to the limit.
In an article written for the Los Angeles Times around the time of the film’s release, Sharp went into great detail about his influences and themes, singing the praises of the western as a genre – “it has the scale of a symphony and the rigorous style of the sonnet” – and carefully stating that his Ulzana is not the real Ulzana, “whose raid was more ruthless and protracted and daring that the one I have written about”, but the idea of Ulzana, and the Apache, as “the spirit of the land, the manifestation of its hostility and harshness.” Just in case there was any doubt that Sharp was working on a higher intellectual plane, he goes on to liken the Apache archetype to Moby Dick and The Searchers’ Ethan Edwards to Ahab. Indeed, Ulzana’s Raid is Sharp’s “sincere homage to Ford”, with McIntosh his version of Edwards, though McIntosh is “a more stoical, more pessimistic, yet more human figure, whose rage against the gods has cooled into a weary antagonism … His is the spirit of the liberal but not yet reduced to impotence by introspection.”3
The spectre of Vietnam looms over Ulzana’s Raid. In the early ‘70s, you could hardly move for westerns that played as Vietnam allegories – The Wild Bunch had already shown the perils of blundering into another country’s war, and both Little Big Man and Soldier Blue (both 1970) drew clear parallels between the cavalry slaughter of the Cheyenne at Sand Creek in 1864 and the My Lai massacre of 1968. Ulzana’s Raid is a slight evolution of this. Sharp was quick to point out that the film is essentially a classic western - “the Indians go out on the warpath, the cavalry chase them, they catch up with them, there’s a fight, and the cavalry win” – and yet he throws in moments of cowardice on the cavalry’s part, a clear signifier that this world isn’t that of a classic western, but something much more primal and dangerous.
In Sharp’s script, everyone is fundamentally compromised. McIntosh might be a more human take on Ethan Edwards, but he’s still little more than a morally denuded mercenary. His fellow scout Ke-Ni-Tay has joined the cavalry to wage war against his own (and his family – Ulzana is his brother-in-law). The cavalry officers are careerist fops like Captain Gates, who blithely volunteers an inexperienced junior officer for what amounts to a suicide mission, or spiritually weak like Lieutenant DeBuin, whose Christian values crumble the moment he decides to use a traumatised survivor as bait, and who is so clueless about life on the plains he can’t even roll a cigarette.
As for the cavalry troops, they’re grunts in a ground war they have no hope of winning, too mired in horror to think straight. An unnamed Sergeant (Richard Jaeckel) tells DeBuin the story of having to retrieve the corpse of a two-year-old boy from a cactus in order to bury it, just one instance of the constant nightmare fodder the troops have to endure. It’s no wonder that they’ve locked into the idea of annihilation as the only practical recourse. Their Apache adversaries are mostly feral, with the notable exception of McIntosh’s mute wife. While Ke-Ni-Tay frames Ulzana’s bloodlust as a direct result of oppression, it is never justifiable, and there is no hint of noble suffering – Sharp isn’t interested in analysing the relationship between the native and the coloniser. Instead, Ulzana and his crew are depicted as a force of nature, and one so utterly red in tooth and claw that it appears insane to the so-called civilised settlers. DeBuin may insist that the Apache are made “in God’s image”, but it isn’t DeBuin’s God; McIntosh sees the Apache as nature personified and therefore can’t hate them, “because it would be like hating the desert because there’s no water in it.”
This moral ambiguity found an advocate in Burt Lancaster, who declared that Sharp’s script was one of the two best first screenplays he’d ever read4. Lancaster was always keen to grime up his starry image with insidious character roles like J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Nazi war criminal Dr Ernst Janning in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and the treasonous General James Mattoon Scott in Seven Days in May (1964), and I’ve always preferred that shark grin when it’s on the face of an irredeemable prick. McIntosh isn’t quite at that level, but Lancaster brings his usual solid presence to a role that demands it, with just enough shading to make him interesting. Before Bruce Davison found a career playing shifty authority figures, he was the go-to for whey-faced milksops, whether they were tragic innocents (The Strawberry Statement) or skeevy little bastards (Willard, Short Eyes). DeBuin is a mixture of both, the son of a preacher man who has the potential to see the world for what it is, but never truly commits, instead compounding his lack of experience with rookie mistakes and apparently learning nothing.
In Robert Aldrich, Sharp found a director more attuned to war films and horror than westerns, which meant he wouldn’t (and doesn’t) fall prey to the kind of sentimentality Sharp found in Peckinpah’s work. And Ulzana’s Raid is more war movie than western, with the Vietnam allegory front and centre. Both star and director fought to keep it that way. According to Aldrich: “We had constant fights with the producer [Carter DeHaven] over it. Sharp, Lancaster and I totally believed in the parallel with Vietnam. The producer thought the public would see it immediately and if they did that would lessen the film’s chances of economic survival. We tried to do it all the same.”
DeHaven was correct: though critically acclaimed, Ulzana’s Raid was not a commercial success, the last in a string of disappointments for Aldrich that led him to shutter his production company and saw him return to work-for-hire gigs5. But it’s unlikely that Vietnam alone was the cause. Ulzana’s Raid is a movie that flies in the face of conventional Hollywood storytelling: its violence is brutal and irrational, its story inherently anticlimactic, and its refusal to believe in individual heroism the antithesis of the traditional western view. Despite Aldrich’s reputation as a gung-ho action director, he was a ballsy liberal at heart, and found two sympathetic collaborators in Lancaster and Sharp. While Ulzana’s Raid might not have succeed commercially or even have much of an audience today, it remains one of the finest westerns of the ‘70s.
Next Up: “Kopetzky & Kanipsia together at last.”
Sharp remained a Peckinpah fan for a good long while, eventually collaborating with him on the troubled adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s The Osterman Weekend (1983).
His first was The Hired Hand, previously discussed at this here Substack.
Sharp providing an excellent example of why writers shouldn’t talk about their own work. Like many autodidacts, Sharp had a way of gilding the intellectual lily sometimes with ten-dollar words. Hey, I resemble that remark …
The other was Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), written by Stuart Millar and Guy Trosper, which got Lancaster an Oscar nomination. I don’t know if Ulzana’s Raid was Sharp’s “first” screenplay; it certainly wasn’t the first one to go into production.
Some of which - Emperor of the North Pole (1973), The Longest Yard (1974) and Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) - are very good, to be fair.