Movies I've Missed Until Now: Apache Rifles (1964)

As many Audie Murphy movies as my dad and I watched when I was young, I’m surprised I never saw APACHE RIFLES, one of Murphy’s later movies that came out in 1964. But missing it back then gives me the opportunity to watch and enjoy it for the first time now.

This is a cavalry vs. Indians movie, but only sort of. Murphy plays Captain Jeff Stanton, a young officer whose father, also a soldier, got himself and his troops massacred because he was sympathetic to the Indians. Naturally enough, this makes Murphy’s character more hostile to the Apaches . . . until he gets to know some of them and falls in love with a young missionary teacher who lives among them. A bunch of white men scheming to get control of Apache land so they can mine on it complicates matters. These plotters are led by L.Q. Jones and Ken Lynch, both of whom are suitably despicable.

This is an odd little movie, a bit of a forerunner to the revisionist Westerns of the Seventies in which all Indians are noble and all white men (except for the one or two who sympathize with the Indians) are evil. Honestly, Murphy looks a little uncomfortable playing a character who becomes so sensitive by the end of the movie. For another thing, when I saw that this movie was directed by William Witney, I thought, “Oh, boy, lots of action!” Well, no. There is some action, and when it takes place, it’s staged excitingly and effectively, as you’d expect from a movie helmed by Witney. But an awful lot of time is spent on guys standing around talking.

All that said, I had a good time watching APACHE RIFLES. Murphy may not have been a very technically skilled actor, but the camera loved him and he takes full advantage of that screen presence. The movie looks great with excellent photography and production values. If you’re a Western fan, it’s a perfectly fine way to spend an hour and a half and I’m glad I finally saw it. Just don’t go into it expecting a lost gem.

Movies I've Missed (Until Now): Gunpoint (1966)

Looking around for something to watch on TV the other night, I noticed that Grit was showing an Audie Murphy Western I didn’t remember ever seeing. Audie was one of my dad’s favorite movie cowboys, along with Randolph Scott and Rod Cameron, and I watched many of those movies with him. Watching an Audie Murphy Western these days feels a little like my dad is visiting me for a while.

So, naturally, I watched GUNPOINT, from 1966, one of Audie’s last few movies before his untimely death in 1969. It starts with something else that held considerable nostalgia value for me: a train robbery filmed on the Durango-to-Silverton narrow gauge line in Colorado, which we rode on during a family vacation in the early Sixties. I recognized it right away. Audie, as the local sheriff, suspects the train will be held up by a gang of outlaws led by the vicious Drago (Morgan Woodward, who else?), but his efforts to foil the robbery are thwarted by his treacherous deputy who’s actually in with the gang. The deputy is played by Denver Pyle, a rare occasion of him playing a bad guy, but he handles the role well.

Through a rather convoluted setup, the outlaws wind up kidnapping a saloon songbird as well (Joan Staley), whose fiancée is gambler/gunman Warren Stevens. Before you know it, Audie and Stevens have teamed up with some other townspeople to form a posse and go after the outlaws. It's a long chase with plenty of action as the posse gets whittled down until finally there are only a couple left to settle things with the bad guys.

I have to admit, there’s not much in this movie that I didn’t feel like I had written dozens of times in dozens of my books, which made for a definite sense of déjà vu. But I enjoyed GUNPOINT quite a bit anyway. The cast is comfortingly familiar. In addition to those already mentioned, it includes Roy Barcroft as the town doctor and Edgar Buchanan and Royal Dano as a couple of half-loco mustangers. There’s a spectacular scene with the train early on and then good stunt work all the way through. The photography and scenery are nice. There are a few lapses of logic in the script by Mary and Willard Willingham, but veteran director Earl Bellamy keeps things moving along briskly enough that they’re not too much of a distraction.

GUNPOINT isn’t as good as most of the movies Audie made earlier in his career. It’s just an average Western. But sometimes that’s all you need, and I had a good time watching it. I think my dad would have, too.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: The Texican

I've been an Audie Murphy fan ever since I watched a bunch of his Westerns on TV with my dad when I was a kid. I suspect my dad felt a certain kinship with Audie, since they were both from small towns in Texas and the sons of farmers. They were close to the same age, too, although my dad was a little older. Of course, my dad didn't have the same sort of combat exploits—he arrived in Europe right after V-E Day and spent his time stringing telephone wire—but I suspect a lot of servicemen from that era identified with Audie to a certain extent.

At any rate, I've enjoyed Audie Murphy's movies for a long time, but somehow I'd never seen THE TEXICAN until now. It's from 1966, late in his career, and a Spaghetti Western shot in Spain rather than a Hollywood studio film, although the two leads, the writer, and the director were all American.

Murphy plays a former lawman from Texas named Jess Carlin. He's framed for a crime by the local owlhoot mastermind (an old and tired-looking Broderick Crawford) and forced to flee into Mexico. But when Corbin hears that his brother, a crusading newspaperman, has been murdered, he has to return to find the killer.

Oddly enough, after Murphy's character returns to Texas, the script by John C. Champion never again mentions the fact that he's wanted by the law. He walks around seemingly without any worries about being arrested, all the while trying to dig up evidence that will prove who killed his brother. We know all along, of course, that Crawford's character was responsible for the killing. Murphy's character seems to know that, too, but his low-key investigation into the affair makes the movie drag considerably at times before it moseys its way to a pretty good final showdown.

Murphy turns in a decent performance, as he usually did. Technically, maybe, he wasn't a very good actor, but I always found him believable and likable in his roles. Crawford seems bored by the whole thing, but his commanding voice and physical presence mostly make up for that. The rest of the cast is all European and adequate at best.

But the photography is excellent, the music's not bad (not Ennio Morricone level, but not bad), and old pro director Lesley Selander, who got his start directing B-Westerns in the mid-Thirties, including some of the Hopalong Cassidy pictures, does a top-notch job of staging the few action scenes the script gives him. All that adds up to a movie that's maybe slightly below average, but it still held my interest and I'm glad I watched it.