Wonderfully offbeat film!

The greatest movie ever made..!

In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

1958 and the screens, both big and little, are filled with six-guns. Small wonder this oater got lost in the mix. There's nothing much to distinguish it. Instead clichés abound, from blood-thirsty Apaches, to handsome hero (Calhoun), to young love even in the midst of battle. I did like that imaginative early version of a hand grenade. Good thing the Apaches oblige by bunching up so that a couple grenades finishes them off. Note that Calhoun is a co-producer, so I guess it's not surprising that his character Logan would dominate everything in sight. Calhoun certainly looks the part, but I'm inclined to think that even by cowboy standards his prowess is a bit much. All that self-assurance tends to drain the film of needed tension. I'd like to have seen more of that great tough guy Leo Gordon (Zimmerman). More rivalry between him and Logan would have added needed suspense. One lasting aspect, as others point out, is tragically premature deaths of three cast principals (Pittman, Craig, and Bates), making this something of a star-crossed film. Anyway, I wish there were something to distinguish this oater from the pack, but there really isn't. You've likely seen it all before, including the musical score.

Well it doesn't get any more Cowboys and Indians than this now, does it? Rory Calhoun shifts gears only slightly from his Bill Longley persona in 'The Texan' TV series to head up a group of stranded travelers and Cavalry soldiers to take on the Apaches in this quick paced Western. The standard clichéd characters are all here, like a love interest (Barbara Bates) for the hero, an Apache hating Indian (Frank DeKova), and a know it all Army sergeant (Leo Gordon) who knows better than itinerant drifter Logan Cates (Calhoun) how to get out of the fix they're in. Who would you bet on? This is actually pretty entertaining in it's own way. Often the romance angle gets in the way of these stories, but this one's OK, in fact there are two of them. The one involving Lonnie Foreman (Tom Pittman) and Junie Hatchett (Carolyn Craig) is actually kind of sweet if you go in for that sort of stuff. As for Logan, he had some trouble figuring out what his drifting was all about by the end of the picture, so that ride off into the sunset was to be expected.The film had a couple of unexpected pluses if you've watched a lot of Westerns and think you've seen it all. How about soldier Graves getting shot by an Apache fire arrow? That was a first for me, as well as that creepy gila monster staring down Logan in the Apache camp. The picture produced a few minutes of interesting tension with that scene even if it went nowhere, but it was cool enough to mention.The payoff was a clever concoction as well, as Logan had those canteens rigged with gunpowder and pebbles to take out most of the renegades. I thought for sure we'd get a look at the villain Churupati since he was mentioned more than once, but that was not to be. When it was all over, I just had to ask one rhetorical question - what ever happened to the rest of those soldiers?

Sometimes tense B-western stars brawny silent-type Rory Calhoun as a drifter who holds up with an assortment of characters (most reluctant to heed his sage advice) at a waterhole after Apache raids kill a number of their companions. After first rescuing an orphaned young woman (Craig) and wounded young pioneer (Pittman), he's joined by old flame (Bates) and her cowardly fiancé (Dehner), a quartet of Confederate soldiers and a wily gold-prospecting Indian (DeKova) a tribal enemy of the Apaches. As food and water become scarce, tensions within the group cause hysteria and various characters lose their cool leading to fatally poor decisions as cabin fever spreads.Calhoun gets good support from Bates as his scorned former lover, while Myron Healey has a reasonable role as an initially resilient Confederate, who succumbs to panic at the thought of never seeing his family again. Leo Gordon is imposing as the principal agitator among the group, spurred on by greed and selfish motivations to survive at any expense.It's economical and typical of Columbia Pictures westerns at the time, with director Nazarro keeping the melodrama to a minimum and the tension palpable. Apache sympathisers might be offended, with the tribe depicted simply as marauding scalpers, while Craig's nubile wife-to-be would surely irk the feminists as she fusses over domestic duties trying to impress Pittman and clumsily convince him to take her as his wife and mother to his future progeny. But despite the chauvinism, I still found the movie a reasonably taut, formula western worthy of a 70 minute pause while channel surfing.

Rory Calhoun never really made it to "A" star status as a movie actor,but the roles he played in 'B' movies such as Apache Territory suited him well.A handsome and capable actor he made it bearable to watch movies such as this especially when you needed to while away a couple of hours and forget the troubles of the world.This is your basic story of a group of people in the desert surrounded by a horde of Apache indians intent on doing them harm. John Dehner and Leo Gordon -two extremely competent character actors- add to the allure of Apache Territory. The only failure I found was the addition of two goodlooking females to add romantic interest,when the filmmakers could have concentrated more on the interaction between the attacking Indians and the U.S. calvary. The movie tends to drag in the middle stages,due I think to the female cast members ,but finally builds to an entertaining climax. Overall a nice movie to watch when its raining outside and you don't want to mow the lawn.