7/10
"What are we fighting, Apaches or ghosts?"
30 August 2016
Warning: Spoilers
What? That's how it ends!?!? Captain McCloud gets the girl? How did that happen, when the whole time Lieutenant Whitley called on her whenever he had the chance. Sure, McCloud might have shown a romantic interest, but if one recalls his self-invitation to dinner in the early part of the picture, Miss Clemson (Audrey Long) asked him to bring along the young lieutenant who 'seems a friendly sort and rather lonely'. I guess the Captain was good at ignoring the signals.

You've got an average Cavalry Western here with the compulsory villains making trouble between the good guys and the Indians. However the good guys have a troublesome soldier in the ranks as well, as Major Nathan Stark (Robert Shayne) relieves the almost promoted McCloud, intent on keeping the Apaches led by Geronimo under control, if not outright removing them from the territory.

As soon as old Sagebrush (Eddy Waller) got that arrow in the back from renegade Cliff Taggert (Douglas Kennedy) you had to figure what was coming next. If you've seen enough of these Western yarns, you knew that the arrow used was going to end up being from the arsenal of a different Indian tribe. No one ever lets the bad guys in on that trick so they keep right on using it to their disadvantage.

A nice plus for this film was the use of a non-White actor in the role of Geronimo. Miguel Inclan appears to have quite a few movie credits to his name, and he did have kind of a warlike, regal bearing for an Apache that he used to good effect. That whole business with the Apaches speaking in Spanish though was a bit of a puzzler. Maybe that's what Geronimo meant when he said "There is bad medicine in the wind".
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