The Late-Late-Late Show Project (as referenced here)
No. 1: Fury of the Apaches, original Spanish title El Hombre de la Diligencia, which could translate as The Man of Diligence, or The Diligent Man (as in a thorough and careful fellow), but more than likely means The Man from the Stagecoach, or Stagecoach Man, as there's a stagecoach in this movie trailer, the first in Something Weird's The Late-Late-Late Show video comp, but there's very few diligent men, unless they're diligent about killing Apaches.
Fury of the Apaches was a Spanish-Italian co-production from 1964, which incidentally was the same year Leone and Eastwood broke new ground with A Fistful of Dollars. No two European westerns could seem further apart, either stylistically or philosophically. This is not an indictment on The Fury of the Apaches, but it shows the aesthetic broad-jump A Fistful of Dollars made within the genre.
Of course, this reading is made solely on viewing the trailer, not the actual feature film, so whatever critical judgments I make are clearly suspect. The Fury of the Apaches could be a magnificent film. It could be playing with the tropes and conventions of the genre. It could be the work of an inspired hand. It's director, Jose Maria Elorrieta, began his film career making short documentaries on Spanish painters and architectural treasures, so he may understand pictorial style. He also wrote many of the films he directed. However, glancing through his filmography one sees the straight and narrow road of a journeyman, a man who kept his fingers in many pies, generically speaking, from an early 60s sentimental convent drama starring Soledad Miranda, a wacky and sexy 1967 fantasy-comedy with Jeffrey Hunter, and an early 70s vampire film, and westerns like Fury of the Apaches. It could be that the inhuman butchers who edited the trailer and wrote the accompanying copy, drained the subtle beauty from the original, purged its moral ambiguity, removed the ahead-of its-time sensitive portrayal of Native Americans, and in its stead had a manly stentorian voice read over gunshots, whistling bullets, galloping horses, shrieking Apache war cries:
An epic episode in this epic story of the West. As our pioneers face the fury and terror of a savage land and a still more savage people. The paleface frantically search for gold but often found... The Fury of the Apaches!
Instead, we have a carnival of cliche. Here's one exchange. Our hero, Major Loman, portrayed by American Frank Latimore, fights another fellow and then holds him at bay with a loaded Winchester. In between them stands Ruth, played by our female lead, the lovely Filipina Liza Moreno (whose own filmography includes a turn as Darna, the Philippines' biggest comic book heroine). She speaks:
"Don't shoot Loman. Don't. For my sake." (Rather unspiritedly)
In walks another fellow, who surveys the situation bemusedly. He speaks:
"You two have found a good time to kill each other! You two! Why don't you wait 'til we got rid of the Apaches!" (In a campy Paul Lynde kind of voice)
You get the gist. Remember those scenes in old movies when someone would turn on a TV set, a cowboy and Indian movie would come on? The generic late movie (at least from the fifties and sixties), the western everybody's seen for a million times? Imagine your grandad, flipping through the TV Guide after dinner on the easy chair in 1967, finding Fury of the Apaches is coming on at 8 on channel 9, lighting his first Pall Mall of the evening, gets off the chair with a grunt, clicks the dial to 9, adjusts the "goddamn" rabbit ears, settles down with a cold can of Ballantine Ale, farts. Within 30 minutes, in between ads for Tareyton cigarettes and Lou's Used Car Emporium, grandpa's out like a light. Later, grandma nudges him awake and she leads him to bed. Does he tell his buddies at the plant about the wonderful find he saw the night before?
Hell no. He leaves it for his smartass grandkids, college educated but barely making a living, to spend way too much effort on some paella-spaghetti western he may have given the time of day (and only that). Then again, he may have known it as Apache Fury, which was its original American title. Or perhaps he knew it as Ranch of the Doomed? Who would give a shit about some cowboy picture?
Indeed. I was ready to quickly dismiss Fury of the Apaches as a reactionary western, perhaps even Francoist one, at least in the trailer's depiction of the Apaches. Even John Ford was enlightened about the Indians in 1964. Then I found a blurb on the film (yes, you can have it on VHS):
Geronimo's Apaches attack a stage coach full of people who take refuge in the wrong place at the wrong time. On board is the infamous Judge Driscoll (George Gordon) and his lovely fiancee Ruth (Liza Moreno) who are on their way to the altar with a fortune packed away in their belongings. Waiting at an abandoned rest stop is Loweman (Frank Latimore), the man Driscoll sent to prison years before so he could steal the man's gold mines. Meanwhile, the Apaches continue their attacks joined by another tribe. To make a bad situation worse, tensions are mounting, tempers flaring and Driscoll's connection to Ruth's first husband's death is revealed within the claustrophobic confines of the rest station. More of a Soap Opera than a Horse Opera, the personal bits of bitter history the characters share are as scary as the Indian raids.
It's a Douglas Sirk western! Imagine Almodovar in 1964, lensing a western!
The Western genre as our grandfathers knew it is, for the most part, dead. Westerns are still produced, but very seldom. Clint Eastwood, the last great master of the Western genre, hasn't made one in 12 years. The dusty excitement the Western provided to audiences two generations ago, like the grimy thrills of 70s crime thrillers, and the techo-shocks of today's quasi-sci-fi product, are all one and the same. It's the same story but in a different context. But what makes older films interesting is when it's seen in a different context, i.e. the Western as soap opera. It's what makes contemporary films interesting as well. Just watch!