The Exiles

During the dry desert autumn of 1909, a troublesome Paiute Indian named Willie shot the father of the Indian girl he wanted to marry. Willie was not a criminal according to Paiute custom; under tribal law, the theft of a girl constituted marriage. What followed, however, had nothing at all to do with custom.

Willie and the girl, Lolita, lit out for the Mohave Desert. He could normally have hidden on tiny reservations until the trouble blew over, since Indian killing was a matter of little concern to the white community. But at that time, it happened that President Taft was making a cross-country tour, followed by a bored and weary press corps looking for a story to break the whistle-stop monotony. They found what they wanted in Riverside, Calif.

Once the newspapers published their first dispatches about Willie and Lolita, rumors spread of a full-scale Indian uprising. It was said that Willie was out to assassinate the President. Someone dubbed him "the mad dog of the Morongos"--and he was hunted like one. Willie covered almost 500 miles on foot, through the Morongo Valley, past Surprise Springs and Deadman's Dry Lake, until he was finally cornered on Ruby Mountain. Earlier, he had shot the girl to keep her from getting caught. On the mountain, he challenged a sure-shooting lawman with an empty rifle, a gesture that amounted to suicide.

Man Alone. This extraordinary historical footnote has been refined and condensed into a hard, gritty new movie called Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. Writer-Director Abraham Polonsky makes good use of all the obvious contemporary parallels but deliberately holds them in check. The result is a subtle, intense document of racial persecution that stands as one of the finest films of the year.

As Polonsky has conceived of Willie--and as Robert Blake plays him with cold command--he is a symbol of Hemingway's maxim in To Have and Have Not: "A man alone ain't got no bloody chance." Willie has even less than no chance. "I'm only an Indian," he tells his girl (Katharine Ross), "and no one cares what Indians do."

The only characters in this despairing vision who are allowed even a trace of self are a Radcliffe-educated Indian agent (Susan Clark) and the sheriff (Robert Redford) who heads the posse that hunts Willie. But the agent's social concern is only a manifestation of her neuroticism, and the sheriff's primitive feelings of empathy with the fleeing Indian are overcome by ingrained habit.

Polonsky's talents were marked and sharpened by the rhetoric of Depression politics. The result is that, on occasion, his script blows its otherwise immaculate cool--as when a poolroom tough delivers one of those drunken "I'll-tell-you-what-democracy-is" speeches. Although Redford and Clark are both excellent in their roles, Katharine Ross offers a major challenge to credibility as Willie's Indian girl, called Lola in the film. She looks little like an Indian and is obviously too refined to act like one.

Dead Anyway. The movie is well served by the shimmering, bleached-out color photography of Conrad Hall. It Is obvious from the opening scenes, however, that this is most deeply Director Polonsky's picture. Author of the remarkable script for Body and Soul ("Everybody dies!"), Polonsky made his directorial debut with another John Garfield movie, Force of Evil, in 1948. An ode to gangsterism and individual morality, it passed almost unnoticed on initial release. As a lifelong proponent of the sort of radical politics frowned upon during the witch hunts of the 1940s, Polonsky did not long escape the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Bludgeoned by the Hollywood blacklist, Polonsky did not work under his own name again for almost 20 years. Polonsky, now 59, kept alive by writing TV scripts under pseudonyms and accepting an occasional anonymous movie rewrite. Willie Boy is only the second film he has directed, and he feels that it sums up his own years of loneliness. "Hell," he says. "This isn't a movie about Indians. It's about me."

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