Apache Trail (1942)

Film: Apache Trail (1942)

Stars: Lloyd Nolan, Donna Reed, William Lundigan, Ann Ayars, Connie Gilchrist

Directors: Richard Thorpe & Richard Rosson

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Donna Reed: click here to learn more about Ms. Reed (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Donna Reed's career at its beginnings was unusual because while she started out playing significant parts, she never really graduated to the kind of film stardom we generally associate her with.  We'll talk about this more next week, but when you think about Donna Reed's film career, you don't necessarily think about her as having a lack of success.  She won an Oscar, after all, and she starred in two undisputed classics of Hollywood's Golden Age (It's a Wonderful Life and From Here to Eternity).  But in her early years before she took on Mary Bailey, she largely was a disposable love interest in a number of different films for MGM, the studio she signed a star contract with in 1941.  Though she appeared in a lot of movies during this era, none of them stand out with the exception of It's a Wonderful Life in retrospect, largely because Reed was a minor character, just a pretty girl-next-door love interest.  Weirdly I've seen a lot of these films for other projects on the blog, so to signify this era, we're going to talk about Apache Trail, one of the few westerns that Reed appeared in, and one of her first higher-billed roles (she was rarely "top" billed).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie starts with the honorable Tom O'Folliard (Lundigan) getting out of jail for a crime that we learn eventually was largely the result of his brother Trigger Bill's (Nolan) involvement.  Tom is given a tough job, managing a remote stagecoach stop that is frequently under attack by Apaches.  There he meets a woman named Rosalia (Reed), whom he knew in her youth but has grown up to be a beautiful young woman, and also comes across Constance Selden (Ayars), a wealthy woman with a mysterious past (that, quite honestly, we don't get enough of and feels like a giant plothole given she gets a pretty pleasant sendoff for a woman who might've murdered her husband or at least cheated on him).  We also have the return of Trigger Bill, who comes fleeing the Apaches, who want him dead, and after a fraternal showdown over a valuable lock box that Bill wants, the entire stagecoach has to decide whether or not they want to give Trigger Bill up to the Apaches to save their own lives.  They vote no, with Tom the deciding vote, but Bill leaves to join the Apaches anyway, understanding his time is over.  Tom & Rosalia kiss, and we get our happy ending.

This is a pretty standard-issue western, and would be fine (westerns & film noirs are generally my favorite genres so I'm more generous in my ratings with them) were it not for the pretty overt racism that runs through it.  We don't actually see any Native American characters, but they are referenced often, and rarely in flattering terms.  The best performance in the movie (by far) is Nolan's, who gets top billing as the villain precisely because he's the only thing of interest to look at, and when the film gets off of his evil quest, particularly in the last twenty minutes when he's largely sidelined, it loses focus.  It doesn't help that O'Folliard, a notorious outlaw who ran in real life with Billy the Kid, is portrayed in this movie as a handsome wet blanket by Lundigan.

As for Reed, get your cringe meters on, because this is definitely a low point in her career.  Reed plays Rosalia Martinez, and yes, she's supposed to be Latino (which the lily white Donna Reed was not), and plays the part with a thick, stagnated accent.  She has very little chemistry with Lundigan (Ayars as the other woman has the better time of it), and her character's entire journey is to stare moon-eyed at him in every scene.  This is not the brilliance that Reed would bring to Mary Bailey, but based on my experience with Reed playing window dressing love interests during this time, is far more indicative of the kind of roles she was getting from her studio.