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Romeo and Juliet (1968), Romeo and Juliet (1968),
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Semi-Documentary
Crime Dramas - 10/2
For a dose of realism with
your crime dramas, try
this 6-film festival that
includes Broderick
Crawford in Down Three
Dark Streets (1954) and
Elia Kazan's
Boomerang! (1947),
based on a true murder
case.
MORE >
Featured Films
Monte Walsh
Baseball Dramas - 10/24
Bad Company
A Man Called
Horse
Scratch the surface of an Elliot Silverstein film and
you’re likely to find a decent but untested
protagonist having his or her mettle tested, if not
forged outright, by an especially grueling trial by
Guest Programmer: Rainn Wilson
- 10/14
Silent Sunday Nights - October
Schedule
High Plains
Drifter
Posse
fire. This is true of the long-time TV director’s
1965 feature film debut, Cat Ballou (1965), his
1973 rape-revenge drama Nightmare Honeymoon
(a project picked up by Silverstein when original
director Nicolas Roeg dropped out in the first week
of shooting) and the 1977 cult favorite The Car, in
which sleepy small town sheriff James Brolin must
rise to the occasion of a killer automobile mowing
down slow-moving members of his community.
Never was this character arc more fully and
brutally realized than in the controversial 1970
western A Man Called Horse.
The project originated with a short story by Iowaborn writer Dorothy M. Johnson, whose tales of
frontier life also inspired Delmer Daves’ The
Hanging Tree (1959) and John Ford’s The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). The story had
first been published in Colliers in 1950 and was
later collected in the 1953 anthology Indian
Country, reprinted in 1968.
The film belongs to a revisionist subgenre of the
movie western, where it sits in the company of
Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Ralph
Nelson’s Soldier Blue (1970) and Robert Aldrich’s
Ulzana’s Raid (1972). At the time of its release,
critics short-listed A Man Called Horse with
several films by Peckinpah (particularly 1971’s
Straw Dogs), as well as with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie
and Clyde (1967) and Francis Ford Coppola’s The
Godfather (1972) for the unflinching quality of its
onscreen violence.
A precursor to Dances with Wolves (1990) in the
way it invites viewers into the mysterious and
seemingly cruel world of tribal Native Americans,
A Man Called Horse follows the plight of British
dandy John Morgan (Richard Harris) after being
abducted by prairie aboriginals. Kept at first as a
beast of burden but surviving every indignity
heaped upon him, Morgan slowly wins the hearts
Psycho Killers - 10/25
Jacques Tati's 101st Birthday 10/9
Warner Bros. Gangster
Collection Vol. 4 on
DVD
A new 6-disc set that
includes Humphrey
Bogart, George Raft &
William Holden in
Invisible Stripes (1939),
Kid Galahad (1937)
with Edward G.
Robinson & Bette Davis,
Larceny, Inc. (1942)
and much more.
Was: $59.99
Now: $50.99
MORE >
Arch of Triumph Available 10/14!
A doctor living in WWII
Paris illegally, saves a
drifter from killing
herself and the two fall
in love in this 1948
romantic drama directed
by Lewis Milestone and
starring Ingrid Bergman
& Charles Boyer.
Was: $14.99
Now: $12.74
MORE >
and minds of his captors (in particular, former
“Miss Universe” Corinna Tsopei as an alluring
Sioux squaw), proving his bravery by defending
the camp against a Shoshone attack and by
undergoing the torturous “Vow to the Sun” - an
initiation rite in which Morgan is suspended from
bone daggers stuck through his pectorals and left to
hang over night. Images from this set piece figured
prominently in the film’s advertising and fueled
debates about the permissiveness of the so-called
“New Hollywood,” where depictions of sexuality
and brutality were thought to be given free rein. In
truth, westerns had long accommodated a high
level of sadism and suffering. Vignettes of sickness
and recovery were common in the novels of Zane
Grey and in films the physical destruction of a hero
or anti-hero (the public floggings of James Stewart
in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Marlon
Brando in One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Charlton
Heston’s knifing/burning in Will Penny (1968),
Franco Nero’s broken hands in Django, 1966) was
a necessary step toward his Christ-like rebirth.
After the public taste shifted away from oaters in
the 1980s, the torture torch was carried forward by
such hard-bodied action stars as Chuck Norris,
Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and
Mel Gibson, who as a director brought a
Peckinpah-like hyperstylization to his Biblical
blockbuster The Passion of the Christ (2004).
Thirty-five years ago, few A-list movie stars had
the unbridled chutzpah of Richard Harris. One of
eight children born to a Limerick, Ireland flour
miller, Harris made a splash in the United
Kingdom (and was nominated for an Academy
Award®) for playing the angry young leading man
of Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963)
but it was as the mercurial costar of Charlton
Heston in Major Dundee (1965), Doris Day in
Caprice (1967), Vanessa Redgrave in Camelot
(1967) and Sean Connery in The Molly Maguires
(1970) that his stardom reached meteoric heights.
(Whether these projects exceeded studio
expectations or tanked at the box office hardly
mattered.)
By 1970, Harris was an in-demand actor and an
award-winning recording artist… and his film
choices just got weirder and weirder. Starring as
“Old Ironsides” in Cromwell (1970) and playing
Richard the Lionheart to Sean Connery and
Audrey Hepburn’s Robin and Marian (1976)
brought prestige to his resume but the decade was
largely taken up with offbeat projects such as the
snowbound survival tale Man in the Wilderness
(1971), the downbeat revenge western The Deadly
Trackers (1973), the comic book gangster romp 99
and 44/100% Dead (1974), the plague-on-a-train
thriller The Cassandra Crossing (1976) and the
killer whale box office flop Orca (1977). Poised
somewhere between the ridiculous and the sublime
was A Man Called Horse. Despite his high star
wattage, Harris was not at the top of producer
Sandy Howard’s wish list. First choice Robert
Redford declined the role and went on to star in the
somewhat similar Jeremiah Johnson (1972).
Bronx-born independent producer Sandy Howard
had happened upon Dorothy Johnson’s collection
of prairie tales while recuperating in Tokyo from
dysentery he had contracted in India. In agony and
unable to understand the Japanese doctors treating
him, Howard lay in bed for three days reading any
books he could find that were written in English.
Acquiring the rights from Johnson for $250 and
selling the deal to the CBS subsidiary Cinema
Center Films, Howard assigned the adaptation to
Jack DeWitt (who dreamed up the Sun Vow
ceremony, not present in the original story) and
direction to Elliot Silverstein. On location in
Durango, Mexico, Richard Harris quarreled often
with his director, who had really wanted Tom
Courtenay to play John Morgan (with Buffy SaintMarie as Morgan’s Sioux love interest). For his
part, Silverstein clashed with Sioux nation
historian Clyde Dollar (who kept a running list of
the mounting inaccuracies and anachronisms) and
Sandy Howard. After a disastrous test screening in
Oakland, Howard spent nearly a year and another
$2 million to recut the film – an investment in time
and sweat that paid off in a sizeable success on par
with Camelot. Howard and Harris subsequently
formed a friendly partnership, resulting in two
sequels to A Man Called Horse, the similarly
grueling Man in the Wilderness and the bittersweet
Echoes of a Summer (1976), which featured Jodie
Foster as a dying child and inspired John Hinckley
to attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan.
Despite the greater degree of artistic control and
profit-sharing written into his subsequent films,
Harris’ career faltered mid-decade, forcing him to
take jobs abroad and in Canada while his outsized
acting style became fodder for comedians and
impressionists (most notably in the Second City
TV sketch “The Man Who Would Be King of the
Popes,” which skewered Harris alongside Richard
Burton and Sean Connery). Late life redemption
came with choice supporting roles in Jim
Sheridan’s The Field (1990), which netted Harris
his second Oscar® nomination, and Clint
Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992). Shortly before his
death, Harris was cast as warlock mentor Albus
Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s
Stone (2001) and its first sequel. Richard Harris
died from complications of Hodgkin’s lymphoma
in October of 2002. After backing a string of
disparate but memorable films, among them The
Devil’s Rain (1975), The Island of Dr. Moreau
(1977), Vice Squad (1982) and The Boys Next
Door (1985), Howard succumbed to the effects of
Alzheimer’s disease in May of 2008.
Producer: Sandy Howard
Director: Elliot Silverstein
Screenplay: Jack DeWitt; Dorothy M. Johnson
(story)
Cinematography: Robert Hauser, Gabriel Torres
Art Direction: Phil Barber
Music: Lloyd One Star, Leonard Rosenman
Film Editing: Philip Anderson, Michael Kahn
Cast: Richard Harris (John Morgan), Dame Judith
Anderson (Buffalo Cow Head), Jean Gascon
(Batise), Manu Tupou (Yellow Hand), Corinna
Tsopei (Running Deer), Dub Taylor (Joe), James
Gammon (Ed), William Jordan (Bent), Eddie Little
Sky (Black Eagle).
C-114m. Letterboxed.
by Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
Richard Harris: Sex, Death and the Movies by
Michael Feeney Callan
Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film by
Lee Clark Mitchell
Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans
and Hollywood Movies by Angela Aleiss
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