Frankly, today we fully expected to be writing about Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” as the trailer is expected any moment. (Instead, we just have a terrible Photoshopped poster that is making the social media rounds as a meme at this point.) But instead, we came across an essay that the filmmaker recently penned, as a love letter to Robert Aldrich’s 1972 Western “Ulzana’s Raid.” And in it, Tarantino does a succinct job of explaining the difference between ‘Raid’ and the “white supremacist” Westerns that came before it.
Look, it’s not revelatory to call the Westerns of yore “problematic” by today’s standards. Many included some harsh language and storylines about Native American people, as well as some terrible casting decisions. But what Tarantino does in his recent essay on the Beverly Cinema website is show how some of the most highly-regarded Westerns, many by filmmaker John Ford, are blatant examples of white supremacy and fail to live up to other films like the aforementioned “Ulzana’s Raid.”
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“Now this White Supremacy is cloaked under different names… Americanism… Esprit De Corps… Civilized Society… (i.e. White Society), but in the context of Ford’s ‘Fort Apache,’ that’s just a bramble bush by a different name,” writes Tarantino. “And frankly, that meaning was clear even in 1948 when the movie was released. American (white) audiences not only didn’t care, for the most part they agreed. One who didn’t agree was maverick filmmaker Robert Aldrich.”
Tarantino has made no attempt to hide his distaste for John Ford and his films. Back in 2012, the filmmaker was asked about Westerns and shared his thoughts on Ford, saying “To say the least, I hate him.” And in his most recent essay, Tarantino touches on his Ford hatred, but also uses his words to prop up a Western that he feels does right by the Native Americans and actually is a much more successful film than anything by the legendary director.
“‘Ulzana’s Raid’ is hands down Aldrich’s best films of the seventies, as well as being one of the greatest westerns of the seventies,” the filmmaker says.
He continues, “Many movies have been made about the conflict between the Apaches and the American Calvary. But only Aldrich’s film dealt with the Apache Wars as a genuine military conflict. Or more to the point, a war film about a giant nationalistic military machine battling a guerrilla army it can’t comprehend.”
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For those that have yet to see “Ulzana’s Raid” or for those wanting Tarantino’s point of view, he goes on to explain the difference between Aldrich’s film and others that get far more mainstream attention:
“The reasons that led Ulzana to run off the reservation with twenty men and engage in brutal bloody slaughter of all who lay in his path, is only vaguely hinted at (being short-changed by the man who sells beef to the reservation). It would have been very easy to lay the blame on some pigheaded Indian-hating white officer (like [Henry] Fonda’s Col. Thursday in Ford’s ‘Fort Apache’), so we could be frustrated by the unfairness of it all. Or to romanticize Ulzana by casting a young good looking dark-haired (white) actor like Robert Blake in ‘Tell ’em Willie Boys Here’ or Robert Forster in ‘The Stalking Moon.’ Or illustrate the events leading up to the raid, and show how events just spiraled out of control (like in Robert Young’s ‘The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez’). But neither [screenwriter Alan] Sharp nor Aldrich engage in such dramatization niceties.”
Ultimately, the essay that Tarantino writes is definitely about his love of “Ulzana’s Raid,” but much like the filmmaker’s many interviews, he doesn’t mince words about why this film is heads and shoulders better than some of its contemporaries. And in doing so, Tarantino takes yet another jab at John Ford, for good measure.