Stephen McNally, Coleen Gray, Willard Parker, Arthur Shields
To coincide with filmmaker, film curator and writer Ehsan Khoshbakht’s ‘How to Make a Retrospective’ session looking at his work on Il Cinema Ritrovato’s major 2022 retrospective of director Hugo Fregonese, we present one of Fregonese’s finest achievements, newly restored.
“One of Hugo Fregonese’s most completely realised projects, Apache Drums was also the last film of the creative producer Val Lewton (The Cat People), who died a few weeks before its release in 1951.
“The film follows fast-talking gambler and gunman Sam Leeds (Stephen McNally), perhaps Fregonese’s most rootless protagonist, after being kicked out of a mining town in the New Mexico desert that is on the verge of becoming respectable. Sent into exile, Sam comes across the bodies of the dance hall girls massacred by a band of Mescalero warriors. He reluctantly returns to town to warn the residents of the impending threat. Even when convention requires Sam to become a hero and lead the townspeople to safety, Fregonese continues to emphasise his weakness and vanity – he’s far more interested in looking like a hero than in actually becoming one, and his flamboyance and impulsiveness leads to disaster. The final siege sequence is one of the most remarkable passages in American cinema.
“Throughout, Fregonese has developed a visual motif of low ceilings (indeed, some of the interiors seem like shots from a lost Orson Welles western) and cantilevered porticos that give a sense of constraint and claustrophobia even to the exteriors (the locations, mostly in California’s Mojave Desert, are themselves quite dramatic and unusual). When the action enters the hall, the camera goes along with it; there are no exterior views to establish the mounting presence of the Apache warriors, but only the pounding rhythms of the war dance (the music, apparently authentic, was supplied by an indigenous musicologist). One feels the influence of Lewton in the mounting suspense focused on an unseen menace, but the release is startlingly original – warriors suddenly diving through the upper windows, their bodies painted in primary colours and bathed by matching pinspots, an audacious concept that looks forward to the bold stylisation of Mario Bava.” (Dave Kehr, courtesy Il Cinema Ritrovato)
Restoration courtesy of Park Circus. Restored in 4K in 2021 by Universal Pictures in collaboration with The Film Foundation at NBC Universal StudioPost laboratory, from a 35mm nitrate 3-strip original negative preserved by UCLA. The in-person screening at BFI Southbank will be introduced by filmmaker, curator and writer Ehsan Khoshbakht.