The
Western, perhaps more than any other genre, was deeply affected
by the changes that took place in society and film production
at the end of the 1960s – within ten years, westerns had
moved from Hollywood staple to something of an anomaly, a position
that – despite the best efforts of filmmakers over the years
– it remains in, marginalised from the mainstream.
The changes began with the Spaghetti westerns in the latter half
of the 1960s, which – alongside American movies like The
Wild Bunch – began to strip away the black hats
and white hats morality and clean-cut, romanticised depictions
of cowboys and Indians to show a grittier, more morally ambiguous
outlaw world. And at the start of the 1970s, several films would
start to examine the Native American experience, stripping away
the clichés of whooping Redskins and looking at their treatment
at the hands of the white man through new, jaundiced and Vietnam-influenced
eyes. Soldier Blue, Little Big Man,
A Man Called Horse and even supernaturally themed
films like Shadow of Chikara used the feel of
the western but took it into new places. That they often did so
with white actors playing the Native Americans is somewhat ironic
of course.
At
the forefront of these films was Tell Them Willie Boy
Is Here, an impressively slick, yet deeply cynical film
set at the end of the Old West, in 1909, when the Indians were
already reduced to life on Reservations and were quickly becoming
westernised. Renegade Indian Willie Boy (Robert Blake) returns
to his reservation after a spell away in jail, and tries to take
up girlfriend Lela (Katherine Ross), only to be warned off by
her family. When the pair of them are caught together, Lela’s
father is shot dead by Willie Boy, and the couple flee, pursued
by a posse led by Deputy Sheriff Coop (Robert Redford), the son
of a famed Indian killer who is now in charge of policing the
reservation and takes his frustrations out in a love-hate relationship
with reservation manager Dr Arnold (Susan Clark). At first, Coop
fails to take the hunt for Willie Boy very seriously, even leaving
to attend a political rally, but when his men are shot at by the
resilient and desperate Indian, he soon realises that this won’t
be as simple as he’s hoped.
Based on true events, Abraham Polonsky’s film is a beautifully
shot, steadily paced film that, typically of the period, offers
no easy answers for its characters, none of whom are particularly
admirable. Willie Boy’s actions make him fairly unsympathetic,
while Coop is too self-centred to understand the gravity of the
situation until his friends are being killed. Despite this, the
film remains fairly compulsive stuff as it moves to it inevitable
conclusion.
Like Badlands from around the same time, Tell
Them Willie Boy Is Here is a grim-faced look at the outsider,
cleverly avoiding making him an anti-hero, and this long-overdue
DVD release is well worth picking up. Odeon have packaged it with
two 40 minute documentaries, neither having any connection with
the film – The Outlaw Trail is a 1978 film
with Redford looking at the surviving escape routes and hideouts
used by outlaws in the past, and though interesting, is more related
to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, while
an episode of The South Bank Show from 1989 looks at Redford’s
Sundance Institute. In the absence of any supplementary material
for the film itself, these are welcome additions..
The
Western, perhaps more than any other genre, was deeply affected
by the changes that took place in society and film production
at the end of the 1960s – within ten years, westerns had
moved from Hollywood staple to something of an anomaly, a position
that – despite the best efforts of filmmakers over the years
– it remains in, marginalised from the mainstream.
At
the forefront of these films was Tell Them Willie Boy
Is Here, an impressively slick, yet deeply cynical film
set at the end of the Old West, in 1909, when the Indians were
already reduced to life on Reservations and were quickly becoming
westernised. Renegade Indian Willie Boy (Robert Blake) returns
to his reservation after a spell away in jail, and tries to take
up girlfriend Lela (Katherine Ross), only to be warned off by
her family. When the pair of them are caught together, Lela’s
father is shot dead by Willie Boy, and the couple flee, pursued
by a posse led by Deputy Sheriff Coop (Robert Redford), the son
of a famed Indian killer who is now in charge of policing the
reservation and takes his frustrations out in a love-hate relationship
with reservation manager Dr Arnold (Susan Clark). At first, Coop
fails to take the hunt for Willie Boy very seriously, even leaving
to attend a political rally, but when his men are shot at by the
resilient and desperate Indian, he soon realises that this won’t
be as simple as he’s hoped.
