Stereotypes In Captain Cherokee

After a decade of inactivity during the 1960s, the British Western subgenre reached its creative peak in the early 1970s, beginning with the release of Captain Apache (1971), produced and distributed by Benmar Productions of England and featuring Lee Van Cleef (High Noon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) as the eponymous protagonist. While the decision to cast a white actor in the film’s lead role and have him apply red makeup to increase his authenticity would be considered exploitative and harmful by contemporary standards, Captain Apache is an incredibly atypical character for a western and affirms few of the cultural stereotypes associated with the Native race. For example, he is neither a ferocious white-hating warrior nor a noble savage
at one with the natural world. Additionally, although the film is set in 1870s, there is no appropriating of traditional Native garments or clichéd scenes of primitive desert communities surrounded by tipis. By contrast, Van Cleef’s character possesses a level of agency uncharacteristic of Native Americans in white productions through his position as a law-enforcing detective. Such is the abandonment of conventions in Captain Apache that its status as a Western is perhaps questionable, for the film could also be considered an attempt to replicate the success of the plethora of detective films released the same year, such as Shaft (dir.
Gordon Parks), Dirty Harry (dir. Don Siegel) and The French Connection (dir. William Friedkin). Nonetheless, the resolution of the mystery at the heart of Captain Apache is particularly revealing about British attitudes towards the United States and its original inhabitants. The “enemies of peace, truth, law and order” as described in the film’s loathsome theme song eventually transpire to be members of a sect within the U.S. army and government who plan on assassinating a President Ulysses Grant impersonator in order to frame the country’s Native Americans and rationalize their extermination. The implication of this plot twist is not only that White America is corrupt and deceitful, but that the country’s indigenous population are by contrast an innocent race undeservedly chastised by settlers. One could take this further and suggest that the film functions as an allegory for Hollywood, with Van Cleef’s strong and righteous Captain Apache being representative of the Native American race as a whole, who find their reputations tarnished on screen by whites through no fault of their
own. In a change to the script of the dominant classical Western production, Captain Apache ends up the hero by foiling the plans to exterminate the country’s Natives and leaves with the glamorous Carroll Baker by his side. Unlike in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), there is no suggestion that the interracial relationship will be detrimental to Baker’s health and cause her to “go Indian”.