"Love Has Many Faces" director Alexander Singer's "Captain Apache" with veteran western heavy Lee Van Cleef as the eponymous character is a murder- mystery lensed on location in sunny Spain, substituting for the Old West of the 19th century America. A West Point graduate, Captain Apache has been nosing around into the murder of an Indian Agent, Commissioner Collier (Luis Induni of "Djurado") and the one clue that keeps popping up is the phrase 'April Morning.' Indeed, not only does Captain Apache struggle to decode the significance of 'April Morning,' but also the chief villain, Griffin (Stuart Whitman of "Rio Conchos"), wants to know, too. He sets his trusty gunslinger Moon (Percy Herbert of "Bridge on the River Kwai") to loosen Captain Apache's tongue. The hallucination sequence after an Indian crone has our hero swallow a potion is visually provocative. Meanwhile, little does our hero realize that there is a conspiracy to assassinate President Ulysses S. Grant during a trip across the southwest. Carol Baker of "Baby Doll" fame co-stars, and there is action aplenty. The final quarter hour of "Captain Apache" unfolds aboard a passenger train that makes an unscheduled stop to pick up the presidential railway coach. Actually, the real Grant is nowhere near the train that his double is riding on, and our protagonist knows that he isn't the real Grant, because he served under Grant during the American Civil War. Indeed, we're given only one glimpse of Grant, and he is never in jeopardy. The film was ostensibly based on a S.E. Whitman. Unfortunately, little aside from Captain Apache's Native American character reaches the screen intact. The novel concerns the efforts of our protagonist to whip a slouchy troop of cavalry into first-rate soldiers, so part of the book chronicles his efforts to rehabilitate these goldbricks. Along the way, the novel's villains steal a shipment of U.S. Government silver that belongs to the Indians as payment for the use of their lands. Captain Apache must find the silver. Meanwhile, a high-ranking Congressman, Senator Blackford, is touring the territory of Arizona to help his cousin, the fort commandant where our hero is stationed, to obtain a promotion.
Philip Yordan adapted the novel, but it appears that all he appropriated was the character and the setting. Yordan's credits include "Broken Lance," "The Bravados," co-starring Lee Van Cleef, "Gun Glory," "The Day of the Outlaw," and "Bad Man's River." In all fairness to Whitman, the novel qualified as a standard-issue oater with lots of rivalry between Captain Apache and the commandant who wants to see him fail. Unlike the film, the novel relies more on historical authenticity, and it shuns the rampant racism of the film. Repeatedly, everybody addresses Captain Apache as "Red Ass." The epithet is amusing. Furthermore, the novel contains none of the comic relief that occurs in the film. The characters that Stuart Whitman and Carol Baker play are not present in the source novel. Lee Van Cleef fans may be surprised to know that he warbled the title tune here, perhaps because he heard Lee Marvin sing in "Paint Your Wagon." Clearly, Van Cleef wouldn't have made it as a Top 40 warbler. Although it is considered a 'Spaghetti western' because it was produced in Europe, "Captain Apache" shares more in common with traditional westerns about Native Americans produced in the 1950s. British lenser John Cabrera's widescreen cinematography is appropriately epic. He has composed each shot as well as the cast in them to achieve balance and creativity. Van Cleef has an amusing encounter with two of Griffin's bodyguards, blonde guys in green suits who try to kill him.
Review of Captain Apache
