Avis des critiques

A bruiser of an auteur, Aldrich fried up American masculinity like his subjects were ants under a microscope. No film of his was more scorching, less forgiving than Ulzana's Raid.

One of the most striking things about Ulzana's Raid, Aldrich's best western and arguably his last great movie, is its astonishingly understated atmosphere and three-dimensional characterizations... Each time I've seen this film, I am struck by its nearly stoic economy, the absolute necessity of virtually every shot—a quality rare in outdoor action films.

Aldrich does let the [filmmaking] side down fairly often. His composer, Frank DeVol, assembles a tuneless concatenation of cliches — cut to watchful Indians, cue sinister flute. The film seems to have none of the grace notes of seventies filmmaking — it isn't visually lyrical or particularly dynamic, though its choppy abruption gives it a vaguely robust quality.

The movie's present-tense quality allows it to transcend both its 19th-century setting and Vietnam war subtext, reminding us that the questions it poses about imperial power, its responsibilities and its shortcomings, are ultimately timeless. Aldrich, a compassionate intellectual beneath his cynical exterior, understood that very well.

At first it seems as though Robert Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid wears the clothes of an acid Western rather loosely and uncertainly. But by its last image of McIntosh trying to roll a cigarette as he bleeds to his death, Aldrich has created a tired and brutal vision of the American west.

A conventional drama given superior treatment by director Robert Aldrich. Aldrich's characters receive condemnation or praise purely as a matter of circumstance—they come to understand cruelty and violence as few are ever allowed (or forced) to. The issues, as Lancaster notes, get kind of confused, but the directorial viewpoint is clear.

Ulzana's Raid and "Play Dirty" take the harder path of confounding the most heroic intelligence of man with the futility and horror of combat. Aldrich and Sharp deserve special credit for twisting and turning away from the John Ford Seventh Cavalry-Apache tradition without deriding the nobility of men on the move, and thus demonstrating that the only way to make an authentic anti-western is to start out as if one were about to make a conventional western.