General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Ulzana's Raid

Ulzana's Raid is a 1972 American Western directed by Robert Aldrich and written by Alan Sharp, in which a US Army cavalry troop led by an inexperienced lieutenant tracks an Apache war party that has left the San Carlos Reservation in 1880s Arizona. It stars Burt Lancaster as the aging scout McIntosh, Bruce Davison as Lt. Garnett DeBuin, Jorge Luke as the Apache scout Ke-Ni-Tay, and Joaquín Martínez as Ulzana, with Richard Jaeckel and Lloyd Bochner in supporting roles. The film was produced by Carter DeHaven for Universal Pictures.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Robert Aldrich; screenplay and story by Alan Sharp¹
Principal cast	Burt Lancaster (McIntosh), Bruce Davison (Lt. DeBuin), Jorge Luke (Ke-Ni-Tay), Richard Jaeckel (Sergeant), Joaquín Martínez (Ulzana), Lloyd Bochner (Capt. Gates)¹
Release	November 1972; New York opening 15 November, Los Angeles opening 23 November¹
Technical profile	103 minutes, Technicolor, Westrex sound, MPAA rating R, 35 mm¹^•²
Production	18 January to mid-March 1972, on location in Nogales, Arizona, Coronado National Forest, and Nevada; budget $1.2 million in seven weeks¹^•³
Historical basis	Loosely inspired by an actual 1885 raid by the Apache leader Ulzana¹
Critical standing	90% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (10 reviews); named by Vincent Canby to his list of the ten best films of 1972⁴^•⁵

Spoilers

Premise

The story opens at night on the San Carlos Indian Reservation, where the Apache warrior Ulzana escapes with a small war party. News reaches Fort Lowell, and Major Cartwright assigns the idealistic young Lieutenant DeBuin to pursue Ulzana with a small company, aided by the veteran scout McIntosh and the Apache tracker Ke-Ni-Tay.⁶ Ulzana's band raids, kills, and loots across the countryside, and as DeBuin encounters the remains of the victims he is forced to learn from McIntosh and to confront his own assumptions and hidden prejudices.⁷

The film treats the pursuit as a tactical contest. Much of the running time is devoted to schemes involving the use of horses, doubling back, and deliberately separating parties to misdirect the enemy, which Aldrich stages with what the critic Chuck Bowen described as masterful swiftness and clarity.⁶ Ke-Ni-Tay explains to DeBuin that Ulzana, having lost power during his years on the reservation, takes power from every man he kills, the more the better; the explanation satisfies the lieutenant's need for a framework but not the troopers' growing appetite for reprisal.⁸

Production

Aldrich had first directed Lancaster in two 1954 Westerns, Apache and Vera Cruz, both co-produced by Lancaster; Ulzana's Raid was their third collaboration, followed by Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977).¹ The closing credits acknowledge filming on location in Nogales, Arizona, and on lands of Coronado National Forest, the Bureau of Land Management, and Nevada state parks.¹ According to IMDb's trivia entry, the film was shot for $1.2 million in seven weeks, three to four weeks less than most Aldrich productions.³ Lancaster, though not formally credited as producer, took a percentage instead of an upfront salary and had a say in the editing.³

Joseph Biroc's cinematography was deliberately unglamorous, shooting the Arizona scrubland in flat, assessing light, and the score was composed by Frank DeVol.⁹^•²

Versions and animal-welfare controversy

The American Humane Association rated the film "Unacceptable" in 1972 because of alleged cruelty to horses during production. Specific objections concerned "horse tripping," a practice in which a thin, nearly invisible wire caused galloping horses to fall forward violently in action scenes. A trade-press claim that it was the first film rated unacceptable since Jesse James (1939) was inaccurate; several other films had received the rating within the previous two years. The horse-tripping scenes were edited out before the film's theatrical release in Great Britain, and in January 1975 the AHA praised NBC for airing a television print with the objectionable scenes excised.¹

Two distinct cuts exist. Aldrich's preferred 103-minute version was released to US cinemas. The European version was reedited by Lancaster himself: he cut a pre-credits sequence showing Ulzana's men leaving the reservation, a scene of DeBuin cleaning his teeth, and much of Mrs. Riordan's suicide attempt, restored material Aldrich had shot but not used, reordered several sequences, and made minor music changes, with the screenwriter Alan Sharp reluctantly assisting. Aldrich said he did not know why Lancaster made the changes.¹⁰

Reception and interpretation

Contemporary response was divided. Some critics denounced the film for a hackneyed plot and excessive violence, while Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised it, writing that "the very ordinary plot does not do justice to the complexity of the film itself," and he analyzed its subtext of violence, racism, and the settling of the West in a December 1972 feature titled "How the West Was Brutal." Canby also placed the film on his list of the ten best films of 1972.¹^•⁵ Commercially it underperformed; the year's Western ticket sales went to Jeremiah Johnson, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Cowboys, and Joe Kidd.⁵

Vietnam-era reading. The film was widely read on release as an allegory of the Vietnam War, with the Apaches cast as stand-ins for guerrilla fighters the US Army could not comprehend; MoMA notes it arrived two years after the My Lai massacre, when real-world violence had acquired a weight genre conventions could barely contain.⁹ Scholars of the period Western group it with Little Big Man and Soldier Blue as films that overturned the myth of the beneficent US cavalryman.¹¹ Aldrich said the film's message was that people cause greater harm through their ignorance of other cultures, behaviors, deities, and customs than through any deliberate intent, while Sharp characterized it as a symbolic effort to convey how evil the world is and how terrified human beings are when confronted with that evil.¹²^•⁵

Later critical standing has risen. Emanuel Levy in 2008 called it one of the best Westerns of the 1970s and one of Aldrich's most underestimated pictures, and Quentin Tarantino in 2019 called it "hands down Aldrich's best film of the seventies, as well as being one of the greatest westerns of the seventies," noting that it combines the two genres Aldrich was most known for, Westerns and war films.⁵ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 90% Tomatometer from 10 reviews and a 65% audience score.⁴ In Spain, where it was released as La venganza de Ulzana in March 1973, it sold 981,517 admissions.²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns before 1980 › Released 1961 to 1979

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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