Lawrence Hall, HSG
Forty Guns to Apache
Pass
If you’ve never seen Forty Guns to Apache Pass, you’ve
still seen Forty Guns to Apache Pass.
Audie Murphy’s 1967 low-budget cavalry vs Indians film
employs every trope of matinee shoot-‘em-ups: a brave, brash young army officer
who breaks the rules, a patient and fatherly commanding general, a platoon of ill-trained,
ill-equipped, and ill-tempered troopers, the usual casting-office injuns (none
of them genuine Apaches), the blonde love-interest and her cranky old Pa, the
love-interest’s errant little brothers, civilians who need rescuing, horses,
wagons, villains, desperate sorties against a powerful enemy, a sub-plot of
redemption, and lots of shootin’.
The film is centered on an element of the mediaeval quest;
in this story the object that will save the kingdom / Arizona is not the Grail
or a magic sword, but forty modern repeating rifles. The faraway government
will send only those forty and only as far as Apache Pass. Our hero and his
comrades must make their way through lots and lots of Apaches to reach them.
After a long journey, many battles against a fierce enemy,
and complications in loyalties and plot twists, the hero and his surviving
companions come through, true love is rewarded, and Arizona is made safe for
truth, justice, and the American way (Superman).
We’ve seen the same plot, setting, and characterizations
over and over in hundreds of assembly-line boots-and-saddles yarns made from
the 1920s until the 1960s on budgets of hundreds of dollars, and yet the same
old stories are still fun. Children enjoyed them as Saturday afternoon matinees
at The Palace or The Bijou for generations, and now we can popcorn-out on the
couch at home, still on Saturday afternoons, for thrilling tales of yesteryear
(The Lone Ranger).
Sometimes we want cinema (pronounce “cinema” as a snooty
anapest): a soupcon of French existentialism, a serious study of
post-war Italian cinema, or a new adaptation of Shakespeare, and then sometimes
we want movin’ pictures with cowboys and Indians and saloon fights. And though
the plots are familiar, that’s okay; Shakespeare’s plots were old when he
borrowed them for his plays.
Audie Murphy was a fine actor – as The American in Graham
Greene’s The Quiet American, filmed in newly independent Viet-Nam in
1958, he is brilliant. But the westerns put more fans in the seats and paid the
bills, and Mr. Murphy was a great cowboy.
One of the best things about Forty Guns to Apache Pass
is the title. The viewer needs no exposition, no advance reviews. He or she
(not “they”; one person cannot be “they”) knows what’s going to be on the
screen and knows it’s going to be great fun.
God bless the American cowboy film, and God bless Audie
Murphy, a hero in the movies and a greater hero in life.
-30-
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