Monday, May. 11, 1970
Home of the Braves
A Man Called Horse is actually Lord Morgan, an aristocratic Englishman in search of big game in the forests of the New World, circa 1825. According to the laws of adventure fiction, a highborn Briton who wanders into the wilderness must undergo total metamorphosis before he can be let out. Lord Greystoke's scion, for instance, went into Africa as a cherubic infant and emerged as Tarzan of the Apes.
Morgan (Richard Harris) enters America as a white hunter and emerges as an Indian chief. His small hunting party is annihilated by Sioux who decide to keep the Englishman as a plaything. They dub him Horse, tether his neck and make him clop about on all fours. Just before his spirit splinters, Horse is beguiled by an Indian maiden named Running Deer (Corinna Tsopei). The only way to bed her is to wed her, he reasons, and to do that he must earn a place in the home of the braves. To prove his prowess, Morgan takes the Sun Vow, a masochistic ritual in which he is hoisted twelve feet above the earth, dangling by blades thrust into his pectoral muscles. He wins Running Deer, and eventually his freedom, but not before a series of unnatural tragedies destroys much of the tribe and all of his new-found identity.
Period Paintings. Five years ago, when social conscience was not so uppermost, Director Elliot Silverstein had no compunction about lampooning the deadpan red man in Cat Ballou. In A Man Called Horse, he capitalizes on honesty. Little of this American-made film is in English; the cast is largely composed of true Indians who look as authentic as their names: Richard Fools Bull, Ben Eagleman, Edward Little Sky. The movie portrays the Sioux as a repressive, formally violent people who master their mutual hysteria by refracting it into a hundred narrow superstitions. But their cruelty is no more harsh or capricious than the weather. And their obsessive chants and dances are produced by men to whom the earth is not a temporary riddle but a final answer.
Unhappily, the purity of the tribal footage is often adulterated with synthetic ingredients. When it is in English, the dialogue is an unstable amalgam of Shylock and Hiawatha: "When you fight the enemy and arrows pierce your skin, you bleed like all men." And in the part of Running Deer's mother, Dame Judith Anderson is relegated to pantomimic mother-in-law jokes. Despite these lapses--and a pseudopoetic slow-motion lyricism--A Man Called Horse has one estimable benefit: it avoids the white-race-is-the-cancer-of-history reproof that has marred much of the New Indian Lore.
In the next year, a slew of movies will treat the Indian in his new role of social victim. Among them: Arthur Penn's Little Big Man, Ralph Nelson's bloody Soldier Blue (TIME, Feb. 2), and Mike Cimimino's The Conquering Horse, which will be shot entirely in Sioux and furnished with subtitles. Each, in its own way, will vary the theme of A Man Called Horse; the western is not dead; it is just rolling over.
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