Movies I've Missed Until Now: Yaqui Drums (1956)

My dad was a fan of Rod Cameron’s Western movies, and we watched quite a few of them together on TV. I’m pretty sure, though, that I never saw or even heard of 1956’s YAQUI DRUMS. So when it aired recently on Grit, I made sure to watch it.

Cameron plays Webb Dunham, a drifter who rides into southern Arizona to take over the ranch that belonged to his late brother, who was murdered by the local range hog Matt Quigg, played by Roy Roberts. Along the way, Dunham happens to save the life of a Mexican bandit known as Yaqui Jack. Yaqui Jack is played by J. Carrol Naish at his scenery-chewing, Alfonso Bedoya-channeling best. Although he’s an outlaw, Jack pledges his loyalty and assistance to Dunham, so you know that sooner or later the two of them will team up against the evil cattle baron. The situation is complicated by a beautiful saloon singer who is Dunham’s old flame but is now engaged to Quigg’s son. On top of all this, we get Yaqui Jack trying to stage a revolution against the Mexican government with only a single Gatling gun and some Yaqui Indian followers.

This movie packs quite a bit into a running time just over an hour. It’s based on a story by old pulpster and paperbacker Paul Leslie Peil, but I don’t know if the source material was a pulp story, a novel, or a story that Peil wrote directly for Hollywood. It certainly plays like a novella from a late Forties/early Fifties Western pulp, though, which means I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. Cameron was getting pretty beefy by this point in his career but still had an impressive screen presence. Roy Roberts was always a good villain. And Naish is a hoot, one of the main reasons to watch this movie.

YAQUI DRUMS was made pretty cheaply, though, and it shows. There are a few good fistfights along the way, but the big epic battle at the end consists of half a dozen of Jack’s Yaqui followers shooting at some Mexican Rurales from inside the courtyard of a hacienda. Since there are also half a dozen Rurales, and we never see the two groups at the same time, I strongly suspect that the same riding extras played both the Yaquis and the Rurales.

Despite it being made on a shoestring and having an ending that’s not as dramatic as it might have been, I enjoyed watching YAQUI DRUMS. I certainly think it’s worthwhile if you’re a Rod Cameron fan. And I think my dad would have liked it, too. At least I hope so.