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Lizards in Movies   Apache Territory (1958)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is one of those old-fashioned cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, and damsels in distress movies with a long Gila Monster scene and a more trivial scene with a rattlesnake. Logan Cates (Rory Calhoun) is a drifter cowboy who knows everything and can do anything. He rescues a teenage girl from the Apaches and takes her to a watering hole in a rock outcrop where he, some cavalry troupers, and several others make a stand and fight off a band of Apaches who have them under siege. After a couple of days they are out of food so Cates puts on some moccasins, grabs a bow and some arrows, and sneaks out at night into the Apache camp to look for food. At the Apache camp, when three Apaches come his way Cates climbs up and lies on a rock ledge about ten feet above where they sit. As he's lying down quietly, a Gila Monster crawls up to his boots. For two and a half minutes we watch the Gila Monster slowly crawl from Cates' feet towards his face, as the camera cuts back and forth between the lizard, the Apaches talking below, and Cate's worried, sweaty face. After the big lizard reaches his face, there's a brief pause, and it turns around and slowly crawls back the way it came. Gila Monsters were thought to be extremely deadly with toxic breath in the old west. If he wasn't trying to stay so quiet Cates would have probably shot the lizard in the usual movie cowboy style, but he couldn't make a sound, so nothing happened. The lizard was just used to create tension. As a fan of good movies, it seems to me that being alone in an Apache camp at night is enough tension, but as a fan of Gila Monsters in movies, I'm glad it was not. As expected, as soon as the Gila Monster leaves, the Apaches also leave and Cates is able to climb down and get away and steal some food to bring back to his people. It's rare to see a live Gila Monster with such a long part in a movie. While it appears to be crawling close to Rory Calhoun, it's possible they used some trickery of glas barrierss or double exposures or something. Maybe that wasn't necessary and it happened the way we see it, since Gila Monsters aren't as fast and dangerous as venomous snakes.