The Gatling Gun (Broadway/Ellman, 1971)

 

Mowing down Apaches

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There is not much evidence of these guns being used in the West against Indians after the war. Custer famously refused to bring Gatlings with him in his Little Bighorn campaign. Maxim guns, not Gatlings, were used at Wounded Knee. But the Gatling made a good story and Western movies featured them quite a bit. Gatling Gun was an alternative title for Siege at Red River. The War Wagon contained a Gatling in its turret. Dale Robertson killed Stephen McNally with one in Devil’s Canyon. They attacked Billy the Kid in McSween’s store with one in Young Guns. A Gatling was an important plot device in Something Big. And so on. And Lt Sheb Wooley gave a Gatling (with only two soldiers, doh) to some wagon trainers who were promptly overcome by Apaches, who presumably got the gun, in Toughest Man in Arizona in 1952.

 

 

 

 

The 1971 Western The Gatling Gun really isn’t very good, though. It has all the look of a cheap spaghetti shot in Spain (though in fact it was filmed in New Mexico). Made by Broadway Enterprises and theatrically released in the US by Ellman Film Enterprises, it was directed by Robert Gordon, his second Western feature of only two (the other was Allied Artists’ The Rawhide Trail in 1958) and his final film.

 

It starred Guy Stockwell, Dean’s older brother. He had been Buffalo Bill in the 1966 remake of The Plainsman but that and this one were his only Western movies (though he spent more Western time on the small screen). He’s OK, I guess, though his hair looks more 1970s than 1870s.

 

 

 

The picture is in the public domain, which means that we often see copies of copies with dismal print quality shown by low-rent TV stations, as I did. The sound was muddy. Furthermore, the width was not adapted to my widescreen TV and so, in fashionable 1971 lower case, the credits told me that the movie starred guy stock, bert fuller, barbara lu and woody strod. Oh well.

 

It was made on a $275,000 budget, so don’t expect a cast of thousands or anything.

 

 

 

It’s a pretty standard (and pretty dull) cavalry/Apache Western, with Stockwell Sr as brave Lieutenant Wayne Malcolm whose mission is to recover a stolen Gatling gun which is in danger of falling into the hands of fearsome chief Two Knife (Carlos Rivas, birth name Oscar von Weber, in his last Western) and his marauding followers. 1870s-ish, I’d guess. Second-billed Robert Fuller (who did fewer big-screen Westerns than you might think; this is the sixth of only eight) is the bad guy Private Sneed who conned well-meaning but foolish clergyman the Reverend Mr Harper (John Carradine, nearing the end of his Western career, but still hamming it up as usual) into hiding the gun – the cleric cannot countenance its use against his beloved Indians. In a dramatic opening, the gun is recovered by Lt Malcolm, though someone has removed the firing pin, so the device is useless. The Apaches attack so it would have come in handy, but nay.

 

 

 

Also on the patrol are Corporal Benton, played by New Mexico bigwig moonlighting as actor Governor David Cargo, and the scout Runner (Woody Strode, in the eleventh of his nineteen feature Westerns). Woody’s son Kalai did the stunts and was 2nd Unit director, as well as being an Apache warrior. So he was quite busy.

 

 

 

They take refuge at a farm and join forces with its occupants, Luke Boland (Phil Harris), his bolshie Confederate son Jim (Patrick Wayne) and the handy cook-mechanic Tin Pot (Pat Buttram), and the latter sets about fixing that Gatling – otherwise it will be curtains for all the whites. Maybe it was a joke that they were Confederates because that was always part of comic Harris’s shtick. Mr Harris didn’t do Westerns as a rule, though I can forgive him anything, even that, for his voicing of Baloo in The Jungle Book. Fellow-comic Buttram was of course one of Gene Autry’s sidekicks (replacing Smiley Burnette).

 

 

 

 

 

Naturally there are swell dames. You can’t have a Western without swell dames. Well, you can, but it’s rare. Third-billed Barbara Luna is the Mexicana Leona, and she soon proves to be less than saintly, ready to canoodle with Sneed, or anyone come to that, to advance her interests. Judith Jordan, in her only Western, poor soul, plays Jim’s sister Martha, and she will set her metaphorical cap at the lieutenant. The two gals will go at each other hammer and tongs, in what is often (rather disrespectfully, I feel) called a catfight.

 

 

 

 

 

There’s the odd bit of trendy end-of-the-60s blood but in general the picture is done ‘straight’ and has little or nothing revisionist about it. I mean, Soldier Blue it ain’t. The Indians are the fierce enemy, whom it is perfectly acceptable to mow down in droves with the Gatling (once they get it working) – one of the reasons that Govr. Cargo got into political hot water from the Native American and pro-Native American communities.

 

But it’s not that I found disappointing, really. It’s just that the whole thing is rather dreary. If you want to see a cavalry Western with Apaches, go watch Ulzana’s Raid (1972). That was seriously classy. This one? Uh-huh.

Signed: