Ulzana's Raid is a 1972 American Western film directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Burt Lancaster and Bruce Davison.
In 1880, a renegade Chiricahua war chief named Ulzana (Joaquin Martinez) orchestrates a daring escape from San Carlos and begins a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the European-American settlers who stole his people's land. The U.S. Military deploys a platoon led by Lieutenant Harry G. DeBuin to neutralize Ulzana's raiding party. Lending their expertise are veteran tracker John McIntosh and Apache guide Ke-Ni-Tay (who is, coincidentally, Ulzana's brother-in-law). As Ulzana continues his brutal campaign of guerrilla warfare against the New Mexico Territory, the inexperienced DeBuin is compelled to learn from McIntosh and confront his naivety and prejudices, while Ke-Ni-Tay begins to suspect he may be the only one capable of decisively ending Ulzana's rampage.
A dark Deconstruction of the "Cavalry vs Indians" conflict, including the director's earlier forays into the subject.
Tropes
- Battle Trophy: Ulzana's son kills a bugler and carries the horn as a trophy.
- Bittersweet Ending: Ulzana has been defeated. But half of DeBuin's men are killed in the final battle, including McIntosh, and the few civilian survivors are very likely scarred for life.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The easiest way to describe the worldview of Ulzana and his men. It is frustratingly incomprehensible to a man like DeBuin who sees the world in black and white.
- The Cavalry Arrives Late: In the climax, DeBuin and his detachment only arrive after Mcintosh, Sergeant Burns, and the other men serving as The Bait have all been killed or mortally wounded, and their bugling nearly allows Ulzana to escape.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Jaded, nihilistic American soldiers against native insurgents. Said insurgents use guerilla warfare and their better knowledge of the land to gain an edge against the larger, technologically superior American force. The Vietnam parallels are easy to spot. The final battle even plays out like an Old West version of sniper warfare.
- Driven to Suicide:
- A dispatch rider surrounded by the renegade Chiricahua shoots himself in the head to spare himself a more horrible fate at the hands of the angry natives.
- Mrs. Riordan, a widowed homesteader raped by Ulzana's raiding party, attempts suicide by trying to drown herself in a lake.
- Ulzana himself, after he realizes that his actions have cost the life of his son.
- Due to the Dead: DeBuin cares a lot about properly burying the dead, whether they are murdered homesteaders, Apache enemies, or his own men. This is mostly shown in a compassionate light, although it does overlap with a Kick the Dog moment when he specifically orders Ke-Ni-Tay to bury a man who was tortured to death.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The Sergeant played by Richard Jaeckal is never addressed by his real name.
- Hope Spot: William Rukeyser, a settler cornered by Ulzana's raiding party, braces himself to be killed defending his farm. He hears the familiar sound of a U.S. Cavalry bugle and thinks he's saved. It turns out, however, that the raiding party killed a bugler and played the Cavalry theme to Troll him. He gets burned alive.
- Made of Iron: One of Ulzana's men is shot two (or possibly even three) times when McIntosh catches up with the ponies, but still escapes for a further distance.
- Mercy Kill: A rather brutal example: Ulzana's raiding party menace a white woman and her child on a stagecoach. A cavalry officer, Sgt. Horowitz, arrives and, fearing the woman is about to be raped, shoots her in the head. When the raiding party turns on him, Horowitz shoots himself for good measure.
- Noble Bigot: DeBuin cycles between disgust at Ulzana's crimes and compassion for the plight of Native Americans as a whole, but at the end of the day, he shares the colonialist fantasy of saving the Natives from themselves rather than empowering them.DeBuin: It’s a lack of Christian feeling towards the Indians that’s the cause of our problems with them.
- "Not So Different" Remark: McIntosh needles DeBuin after several of his men try to mutilate the corpse of Ulzana's son.McIntosh: What bothers you, Lieutenant, is you don't like to think of white men behaving like Indians. It kind of confuses the issue, don't it?
- The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Ke-Ni-Tay has this attitude towards Ulzana. He is ultimately proven to be correct.
- The Quiet One: Ulzana only has about a half-dozen lines. All of them are in Mescalero, none of them are translated.
- Preacher's Kid: DeBuin is the college-educated son of a Methodist minister from New York.
- Reality Has No Subtitles: None of the Mescalero spoken in the film is subtitled or translated.
- Shout-Out: John McIntosh is named for actor John McIntire, who played Army Scout Al Seiber in Apache.
- Suicide by Cop: When Ulzana learns that his son has been killed, he has a Villainous BSoD and allows Ke-Ni-Tay to execute him.
- Tonto Talk: Ke-Ni-Tay speaks in broken English.
