Drum Beat

Sedona became a mountain town on the California-Oregon border in Drum Beat, a 1954 cowboy vs. Indians flick that uses the basic facts of a real-life clash (culminating here in hand-to-hand combat between Alan Ladd and Charles Bronson) but omits key context.

Judging strictly by the promotional materials for Drum Beat, filmed in tranquil Sedona in 1954, you might think Red Rock Country was the most dangerous tourist destination on earth: "Across the lava-caves and buttes of the 'Lost River' land -- above death-craters and painted deserts...Cinemascope breathtakingly bears you to the canyon-straddling foot of 'Superstition Mountain'...where time stopped for the head-on meeting of the man McKay and the adventure supreme!"

It wasn't as if director Delmer Daves was a stranger to these supposed "lava-caves," "Lost Rivers" and "death-craters." He emerged unscathed from a Sedona trip four years earlier to direct Broken Arrow, the classic revisionist western starring James Stewart (profiled in Sedona Monthly in March 2003). Like the earlier film, Drum Beat's story is based on real-life incidents. But unlike Arrow's attempt to portray the Native American point of view, Drum Beat has a more simplistic "cowboys good, Indians bad" plot; it also has spectacular action and actor Alan Ladd, who a year earlier had starred in Shane, a big hit that endures as one of the all-time classic westerns. As a bonus, for the first time audiences were treated to the wide open spaces and red rock peaks of Sedona in CinemaScope.

Though some filming took place near Flagstaff and at the Iverson Movie Ranch in Chatsworth, Calif., most of Drum Beat was filmed around Sedona, though the film is set on the California-Oregon border

Text © 2006 Sedona Monthly

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