Apache Rifles

Another of the movies that I watched off of one of the streaming channels was of a type that I haven't done much of a dive into, mostly because the movies have been on StarzEncore Westerns, one of the premium channels. That is the Audie Murphy western, and the specific movie was Apache Rifles.

A voiceover at the beginning of the movie tells us that the setting is the Arizona Territory in 1879. The Apaches, one of the tribes in that portion of America, have nominally been defeated, at least to the point that they've agreed to live on a reservation where they're supposed to be left to their own devices away from white settlers, dealing only with one of those Bureau of Indian Affairs agents who's probably corrupt. But the Apache have grievances, which they're airing by going off reservation to attack the encroaching whites.

Audie Murphy plays Capt. Jeff Stanton, a captain in the cavalry of the US Army. He's been brought in because he has a reputation for being able to deal with tribal uprisings. He also has a past relationship to the negative with the various tribes. He and his men are eventually able to capture Red Hawk (Michael Dante), the son of the leader of this branch of the Apaches, and uses Red Hawk as a bargaining chip to get the Apaches to agree to a truce. The truce states that the Apache will stay on the reservation, while the Army will ensure that the settlers won't wind up on the reservation.

Stanton, being a good soldier, intends to uphold the terms of that truce regardless of what he thinks of the Apache. But, unsurprisingly, there's gold in them there hills, and there are a bunch of white settlers who would like to get at that gold. Greer (L.Q. Jones) and Hodges (Ken Lynch) are two of those settlers, and they have what they think are very good reasons for wanting to get at that gold. One is that they think they have a legitimate claim to the land and that they've been dispossessed by the truce. But they're also up to their eyeballs in debt, having negotiated terms back east that their funders will get a percentage of the proceeds from the gold. And of course back east is going to want their money.

So Greer and Hodges try to agitate against the Apache and get them to break the truce so that the cavalry will have a legitimate reason to go after the Apache and let the white settlers on the Apache reservation. Complicating matters for Stanton is the presence of Dan Gillis (Linda Lawson). She's a missionary teachin the Apache the English language and how to read, but she's also in the movie as a romantic interest for Stanton and to provide that other bone of contention. Stanton finds himself falling in love with with Gillis, and things get really complicated when it's revealed that she's mixed race and Red Hawk has opinions of the relationship between Stanton and Gillis.

Apache Rifles is the sort of movie that before the advent of widespread television would have been standard Saturday matinee fare, probably made a bit more cheaply at one of the Poverty Row studios. But since the movie was made in 1964, it's got a different feel from those old Saturday matinee pictures. The production values and more intelligent story line are definitely a cut above. But, at the same time, it's also definitely a cut below the sort of bigger movie that Hollywood was making by the mid-1960s, with material like this now seeming more suited to television.

Still, Murphy does a competent job and it's not as if the material is bad. It's more that the material is past its prime. It is, however, definitely watchable.