Evil Lloyd Nolan

I'll have to admit that when I think of actors playing bad guys, somebody who is decidedly not at the top of that list would be Lloyd Nolan, a character actor whose appearances brightened the movies he was in for 50 years. A movie in which he does play the nominal bad guy, although at least one getting the chance to redeem himself, is the B western Apache Trail.

Nolan gets top billing here, although the good guy protagonist and as much a lead as anybody in the movie is a young William Lundigan. Lundigan plays Tom O'Folliard, and as the movie opens he's just gotten out of prison. He runs across his brother, Trigger Bill (that's Lloyd Nolan), who offers Tom his cut of the money from the robbery that put Tom, but not Bill, in prison. Tom, feeling hard done by Bill, wants nothing more to do with crime, and simply wants to go back to his old job with the stage company.

Now, riding shotgun might not be such a good idea for a guy who spent time in prison, so his old boss decides to give him a rather more dangerous and less glamorous job, that of managing one of the way stations in a part of Apache Territory where the threat of ambush from the Apaches is very much real. However, that also gives him the chance to reunite with Mrs. Martinez and her soon to be an adult daughter Rosalia (Donna Reed), who you get the feeling always thought she'd be paired by her mom with Tom.

A stage comes, and on it is the sort of motley group of passengers that you expect for an ensemble piece like this: a widow, Constance Selden (Ann Ayers), who is fighting to get her late husband's cavalry pension that the government denied because he committed suicide; British artist James Thorne (Miles Mander) and his wife (Gloria Holden); and a group of cavalry officers who are ferrying the pay in a strongbox. So, one of the subplots is going to involve the possible romantic conflict between Tom, Rosalia, and Constance, although as you might guess the presence of a strongbox is more important.

That's because Bill shows up again. The Apache are getting restless, as can be seen from the smoke signals, and Bill has done something to piss them off so looks for refuge, with the stagecoach station being the best place he can think of. Not that his brother is happy to see him. But Tom has to go out to try to determine when and where the Apaches are going to attack, and this gives Bill the chance to try to rob the station of the strongbox. You'd think he would have seen enough westerns to realize that trying to get away with a strongbox just at the same time the Apaches are signalling their intention to attack isn't a good idea. Never mind he's the bad guy and hasn't had to pay for it yet under Production Code rules.

Apache Trail is a B western from MGM, so much of the film feels and looks like it's on sound stages and maybe the MGM ranch somewhere out in southern California. But it also has the presence of a fine cast, and they mostly elevate the pedestrian material to something better if not a memorable movie. To be fair, however, the movie was released in late 1942, at a time when studios were still cranking out B movies (this one is only 66 minutes) to give disposable product to movie theaters where people wanted a new movie each week, especially if by this point they wanted something to take their minds off World War II. Just like nobody expects most episodic television to be that memorable, also nobody I think expected the second features to be remembered 80 years later. Apache Trail is definitely worth a watch.