The Peace Mission of ‘Drum Beat’ Involves a Lot of Killing

“It showed the country something they had to learn and remember. Among the Indians, as amongst our people, the good in heart outnumber the bad, and they will offer their lives to prove it.” So speaks Johnny MacKay (Alan Ladd), an Indian fighter charged by President Grant (Hayden Rorke) with a peace mission among the Modoc tribe — a peace mission that involves killing or capturing a bunch of renegades.

MacKay’s underlining of the moral in that final piece of narration signals the relatively progressive veneer applied by writer-director-producer Delmer Daves (for Ladd’s Jaguar Production) to what’s ultimately an ordinary tale of the Cavalry and other white hombres getting in lots of shootouts with Indians. Around this basic narrative line, Daves throws in bits of dialogue about peace and troublemakers and how most of the Modocs are abiding by a peace treaty and are glad to be allotted better land than they had before (so MacKay says), but there’s this band of violent upstarts led by lying Captain Jack (Charles Bronson), who breaks the treaty.

“He bad Modoc!” exclaims one of the good Modocs (Anthony Caruso), whose sister (Marisa Pavan) carries a torch for Johnny. He’s drawn more to a spunky Easterner (Audrey Dalton), so the rival women embody the losing and winning side of this Western expansion deal. In other words, the women are drafted to serve the movie’s idea of “dramatizing the truth”, whereas the real-life Indian woman was distinguished for her heroism with a lifetime pension by Congress and lived until 1920, according to Wikipedia.

A more intriguing sign of the movie’s mixed loyalties is that Captain Jack is so much more charismatic and arresting a character than Johnny MacKay. This isn’t just a function of Bronson’s performance, but also the fact that Jack gets such a proud, contemptuous final scene just before his hanging. He dismisses the preacher’s talk of “pearly gates” and acknowledges the warrior Mackay as his equal, which is an inverted way of having MacKay say the same. Daves had lived among Indians and was sympathetic to them, but this film (complete with non-Indian actors in all major Indian roles) feels like a step back from his Broken Arrow. His most excellent westerns, which emphasize tensions among white settlers and outlaws, were forthcoming.

The movie opens by announcing that the events are real but some things have been changed “to dramatize the truth”. Many viewers will wonder why a film set in the Oregon-California border is shot so obviously and picturesquely in Arizona (the strongest aesthetic element), and that’s a correlative of how the film shifts the ground under the history of the Modoc Wars. The script acknowledges various ideas tangentially, always in the context of establishing that Jack is a villain. If the dialogue had given him more to say in his defense about why he broke the treaty instead of bluster and belligerence, the movie might have seemed positively dangerous. Even so, as Jack dons a Cavalry coat and medals for his own beautification, the camera loves him, and the budding Bronson is what viewers are liable to remember.

Also in the picture are Robert Keith as a vengeful driver, Rodolfo Acosta and Frank DeKova as Jack’s men, Elisha Cook Jr. as a merchant who sells guns to the Indians (cast as a weasel who gets what he deserves), Warner Anderson as the real-life general who dies, Richard Gaines as an ironbound pacifist and Indian defender (also implicitly getting what he deserves), Frank Ferguson as an old salt, Edgar Stehli as the President’s father, Isabel Jewell as the saucy woman who gets pierced in the heart by an arrow that isn’t Cupid’s, and Strother Martin as the grief-stricken soldier near the end. The Cinemascope and WarnerColor film, now available on demand from Warner Archive, could tolerate restoration and probably won’t get it.