This Ravioli Western contains noisy action , shootouts , ravage , fighting , a love story , lots of blood and guts and a big deal of gratuitous violence . It deals with Tommy (Al Cliver), an innocent cavalry soldier and an Indian survive an attack , both of whom will have to pay a dear price for love and will find a lots of dangers .
Al Cliver won't go down in history as the greatest actor ever, or even the most adequate actor ever. He's just kind of there, staring at things.
This is the story of a doomed love, Romeo and Juliet set in the American South West at the time of the Indian wars rather than in Medieval Italy; This time it is not the Montagues versus the Capulets in a vicious civil war, but the US Cavalry in a race-war against the pitiless Apaches. Against all the odds the hero, a US Cavalry man and the heroine, a beautiful Apache girl find love.
For decades, cinema depicted the Native American as a bloodthirsty savage, enemy of the heroic cowboy; then, in the 1970s, Hollywood developed a conscience, and tried to right wrongs with revisionist westerns in which Indians were seen as noble warriors defending their land from the scourge of the white man. Naturally, Italian exploitation cinema quickly followed suit...
The movie starts with a street fight between a cowboy and Anne LeBeau (Joan Taylor) who is half Apache, half white. The fight is about the white town people blaming the Apache for the various crimes in the area.
Fine late Italian western, starring a sympathetic, almost romantic Al Cliver in a world full of racism, opportunism and greed. The story goes thus: Al Cliver is the member of a cavalry unit that takes out some Indians which have left the reservation - mostly women and children, and the old folks; the handful of Indian warriors are out hunting.
"Apache Woman" is a low budget Italian rip-off based quite obviously on Ralph Nelson's "Soldier Blue", but it is not a bad movie. Al Cliver has hardly been in many better ones, and he stars as the soldier who is lost in the wilderness and tries to get back to his comrades.
APACHE WOMAN is a gritty Italian exploitation western that comes across as an obvious copy of the dark and downbeat US western SOLDIER BLUE. The film sees regular go-to guy Al Cliver as an old-fashioned soldier with a good heart who finds himself in possession of the titular character, an Apache as played by Clara Hopf who after a couple of film roles in the 1970s became a make-up artist.
