The “Taming” Of The West-Not-Paul Newman’s Hombre-A Film Review

DVD Review

 By Sam Lowell

Hombre, starring Paul Newman, Barbra Rush, Frederic March, Martin Balsam, directed by Martin Ritt, 1967     

When I was growing up in the black and white in more ways than one 1950s “golden age” of the cowboy sagas that festooned the television airways “the only good Injun was a dead one.” Except maybe the sullen closed mouth Tonto but he was sidekick to the Lone Ranger and so that didn’t count. Of course in the wake of the 1960s and 1970s when all kinds of identity groups emerged I, we, some of us anyway, began to get a better idea of what really happened when the white man and woman went to “tame the West” back in the post-Civil War 1800s. Got a better idea about how the Indians, Native Americans, indigenous peoples, take your identifying pick, got the short end of the stick in about twenty different ways when the whites wanted the land, their land, wanted it anyway they could get it. In that sense a film like the one under review, Hombre, couldn’t have been successfully made in say 1955 but could in the late 1960s although even then as this film demonstrates the Native Americans still seemed to be view to be outsiders, as nothing but trouble. 

In the big battles between whites and Native Americans during the late 19^th century there were plenty of atrocities on both sides. No question, John Russell, El hombre, played by very blue-eyed white-bread Paul Newman, had been affected by that savagery and by the closing down of Native American hunter-gatherer life literally with a bang (somebody put it very succinctly, somebody in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or with an ear into that agency-assimilation or extermination, they tried both in policies that sound very familiar to early 21^st century ears). He had been captured by an Apache raiding party and had lived among them in his formative years, went back with them too when he grew to manhood although he had been previously raised by a white man, John Russell, who gave him his name. When old man Russell died he left his hotel (a hotel of sorts, a few rooms out in the godforsaken blanched desert) in Arizona to young John. John didn’t want it and decided to sell it for a herd of horses (his profession having been providing wild horses tamed to the stage coach company). To do the deal he needed to get to another town and fatefully wound up taking a stagecoach ride with assorted passengers, a rogue’s gallery of Western misfits and outcasts.

The most important passengers though were an Indian agent (played by weasely Frederic March) and a desperado (played by surly rough-hewn and humored Richard Boone). Two peas in pod. Why? Well the Indian agent was honorably “skimming” government funds supposed to go to the reservation Indians in his charge. Nice, right. The desperado because he knew that the Indian agent was skimming and was nothing but a bad ass bandito. In an isolated desolate area near the desert Mister Desperado and his confederates staged a hold-up figuring to grab the saddle-bags full of dough and let the passengers fend for themselves. But the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go awry. Especially when a sullen half-breed like Johnny boy decided that the dough should go back to those hungry Native Americans on that stinking reservation.

John Russell, sullen and alienated Johnny okay, listened to his own drummer so rather than letting the banditos grab the dough he shot a couple of them dead, grabbed the loot and was ready to head for the hills on his own. Problem: these white gabachos, this motley crew of misfits and outcasts, who sneered at him and had forced the stagecoach driver to have him ride outside the coach, started following  him figuring he knew the way back to civilization, or to some place. He relented and let himself lead them back toward where they had started from.

But see although Johnny had killed without a thought those two banditos, Mister Desperado and a couple of his henchmen were still at large-with horses and water. So John lead them back to an old abandoned mining camp they had previously passed. As they rested Mister Desperado and his ilk came tumbling after them boxing them in with no safe from his guns place to go. The idea Mister Desperado had was to force them out using the wife of the Indian agent whom they had taken as hostage as bait.

Well one John Russell might have hated the white man for what he did to people who had been in the West long before them, might have listened to his own drummer on all important matters but when the deal went down John Russell honorably went down the hill for the inevitable shoot-out with the bad guys. Yeah, very blue-eyed John Russell, RIP. In its day this one broke away from the normal conventions about the taming of the West-about the hoary cowboy and Injun sagas I had grown up on. Forty years later there is plenty wrong with the story line but it had some high moments of drama and pathos. Enough said.