War Drums (1957)

Director:

Reginald Le Borg

Writer:

Gerald Drayson Adams (writer)

Release Date:

21 March 1957 (USA)

Genre:

Western

Tagline:

The Deadlist Thunder That Ever Rolled Across The West!

Plot:

The friendship between a white man and an Apache chief is tested when they fall in love with the same woman during a time of frontier conflict. |

Cast

Lex Barker	...	Mangas Coloradas
Joan Taylor	...	Riva
Ben Johnson	...	Luke Fargo
Larry Chance	...	Ponce
Richard H. Cutting	...	Bolton (as Richard Cutting)
John Pickard	...	Sheriff Bullard
James Parnell	...	Arizona
John Colicos	...	Chino
Tom Monroe	...	Dutch Herman
Jil Jarmyn	...	Nona
Jeanne Carmen	...	Yellow Moon
Mauritz Hugo	...	Clay Staub
Ward Ellis	...	Delgadito

Runtime:

75 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Mono (Westrex Recording System)

Certification:

Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15

Filming Locations:

Johnson Canyon, Kanab, Utah, USA

Company:

Schenck-Koch Productions

Quotes:

Dutch Herman: Get two horses and spreadeagle him.
Dutch Herman: I'll show this Indian not to come around here lying to white men.

Minor Western with some amusing moments

It's not flamboyant enough to be "camp," but this movie still offers a number of those so-bad-it's-good moments. Most of these moments occur when the Indian characters have to spout such lines as: "A forked tongue is an evil thing." "The peace words of your people are written on the wind." "On a reservation an Apache warrior will be as an eagle with broken wings."

There's also a visually amusing moment when Lex Barker and Joan Taylor emerge from their teepee wearing his-and-her warrior outfits.

Looking past this hokiness, however, you'll find a briskly-told plot which differs a bit from the usual fare because it involves an Apache and a white man (Ben Johnson) in love with the same woman who's half-Mexican and half-Indian. Though most of the movie's Indians look a bit "Hollywood," they're treated in a sympathetic manner.

Lex Barker, as in his Tarzan days, spends most of the time bare-chested and his torso is shown to advantage in a scene where he's tied between two horses and whipped by some greedy prospectors. "Sign your name on his stinkin' hide," someone suggests, to which the flogger replies: "I would if I knew how to write!" (This flogging ranks 71st in the book, "Lash! The Hundred Great Scenes of Men Being Whipped in the Movies.")

Barker's no stranger to the whip, having taken some lashes in "Tarzan and the She-Devil" and, more notably, in "Terror of the Red Mask." Joan Taylor, laughably miscast, fitted much more comfortably into her most famous role, that of the heroine in "Earth vs. Flying Saucers."