At first when accidentally stumbling upon "Captain Apache" on late night TV and knowing absolutely nothing about it, I derived it would be a story similar to the one told in "A Man Called Horse" (and thus also a predecessor to "Dances with Wolves") and revolving on a white man fighting alongside the oppressed Indians. What else do you expect from a film with a title like that? It quickly becomes obvious this isn't the case, and the titular Captain (the almighty Lee Van Cleef), is simply an eccentric loner but a genuine Indian. He works as an Army officer, but none of the white cowboy-machos respect him because he's a "Redass" and the Indians don't trust him because he does a white man's job. He even has to remove his uniform whilst talking to the Indians, resulting in a shameless and gratuitous naked Van Cleef scene. The whole movie searches for the meaning of the words "April Morning", and the dialogs in the script make damn sure you don't forget them as they're repeated approximately every 7,5 seconds. April and Morning were the last words of a dying officer and they are believed to have an important significance. Captain Apache investigates and quickly becomes entangled in a large-scaled conspiracy of Mexican gun smugglers, quality prostitutes, corrupt army commanders and
genuine witches! The plot is often needlessly convoluted and I easily admit I didn't bother to comprehend everything, especially because the basic premise is rudimentary simple and actually gets revealed already in the two-line plot synopsis here on this site. How absurd is that? Throughout the whole film the words "April Morning" bathes in an aura of mystery and their meaning is successfully kept secret until five minutes before the ending, yet around here the whole film is bluntly summarized in two sentences. "Captain Apache" is overall very forgettable, but it does feature a couple of brilliantly comical moments (Van Cleef's drinking contest with the freaky twin bodyguards or his acid trip inside the witches' cavern), some decent shootouts and not to forget two songs sung by no less than Lee Van Cleef himself. This is the only time Lee was ever credited as a singer and that trivia aspect alone makes "Captain Apache" a curious must-see for fans of Euro-westerns. The presence of cult-siren Carroll Baker ("Baba Yaga", "Knife of Ice", "Bad", "Cyclone"
) as every male character's love interest is another good reason for avid cult fanatics to track down this nonetheless mediocre film.
Review of Captain Apache
