Did they know?

Sat down the other day to watch Robert Aldrich's cavalry vs. Indians Western Ulzana's Raid (1972), figuring it to be a decent potboiler Western from the last period during which American studios were turning out such films. By the end of the decade, the workaday Western was gone, and when Westerns appeared thereafter as in Silverado and Dances With Wolves they were super-special event movies. I missed a lot of westerns from the 1970's from having been overdosed on them in the 60's, so I missed how they had changed.

In a way, it was the way all American films had changed: the loss of innocence, the note of despair and loss. But the Western has a special talent for metaphor, usually carried in a more elegant form than, say a science fiction, which generally brings its politics out front and center. So it is perfectly possible to see Ulzana as just another example of trying-to-outwit-the-wily-Red-Man and nothing more. Perhaps the racism was less virulent, but still woven into the fabric. Being a 1970's film the violence is a little more realistic -- sudden, bloody and yielding consequences more real and painful than a 1930s cowboy clutching his bloodless chest and falling gracefully into the dust.

Today, Ulzana clearly is a Vietnam film. The enemy is largely unseen and they and their cultural context are, to the cavalry, completely unknowable. Their tactics are terroristic in nature. Their goal is to be simply left alone. The cavalry view the Apache as if they were not human, and least not humans like them. Cavalry officers ignore good intelligence (provided by Burt Lancaster as an old scout) in favor of their own narrative frame. Misdirection, missed opportunities and failure in execution leads to military failure by the cavalry. But in a way it doesn't matter, because a victory now would only be temporary, and either this Apache or another would arise to harass the US Army.

The only honorable allegiance is to truth and to other honorable people. Adherence to one side or another seems feckless. This is not warm, but a cosmic game of Chicken, winner is the last one to withdraw.

So the question is...did they know they were making a Vietnam film at the time? Or was this just something in the zeitgeist? Or am I reading something into it that's just not there? I was around in 1972, and Vietnam was, as a I recall, Topic A. So when is a Western just a Western?

Saigon on the Rio Grande

Although my Dad was a Navy man and not a big John Wayne fan, he loved those old John Ford cavalry Westerns. There was an element of wonderful rich fantasy of men living and working together when men and officers would mount up together and we would hear the stout male chorus, which may have been meant to literally be the voices of the men we're seeing ride (usually in backlighting to put them in strong relief), or it may be their spiritual voices singing the joy of this life of shared service and sacrifice. I liked the fantasy, too, and I think it is a tragedy of my generation that we were not compelled to experience that life.

I guess Sam Peckinpah resented the fantasy, because in Major Dundee (1965), he set out to expose it as a hollow fraud. Or maybe he just figured that story had been told and that there were other stories to tell. Dundee feels like a sour fantasia on Fort Apache, both films featuring martinet renegade commanders dealing with threatened Indian attack. Dundee begins with a massacre scene that at the time may have seemed out of The Searchers, but in a few years would seem like an echo of My Lai.

OK, so we're launched into a story of the search for three missing children. Except that the mission led by super-straight, squared jawed Moses Heston as Dundee requires the participation of a disaffected Confederate war prisoner (the Civil War is still going on) played by heavily-mascaraed-Piccadilly-Circus-fop Richard Harris. Then the Indians give back the kids but the Major decides to pursue revenge anyway, pushing into Mexico. Then the Major gets hurt and goes on a bender and has to be retrieved by the potentially disloyal Confederate officer. They handily beat the Indians, but nearly get their butts kicked by the French Foreign Legion, whom they had foolishly crossed earlier in the story. The film has so many story lines (I left out a few, including a half-hearted romance), that it feels like an anthology.

Everyone who writes about the film notes that it is a mess. Some say this may merely have been a reflection of the conditions under which it was produced. But it seems strongly possible that the mess was built into the very conception of the project.

What holds the film together is the disintegration of Dundee's character. And by Dundee's character, I mean both that he loses his grip on reality and therefore on his own identity, AND that he demonstrates less and less good character, with regard to simple human decency (made all the more remarkable because it's happening to good old Charlton Hur). By the end of the film, the mission has lost its mission and plunges ahead without any clear definition of victory or even how to get out. In 1965, none of this was evident in Indochina. Escalation was the watchword, and stalemate would not appear inevitable for another three years.

Prescience or coincidence? On such coincidences, artistic reputations are made.