The New Ways

By JAY COCKS

WHEN THE LEGENDS DIE Directed by STUART MILLAR Screenplay by ROBERT DOZIER

Movies used to portray Indians as grunting marauders. Now everything about them, from their history to their handicraft, has become topical, even chic. In recent films they have been treated--or mistreated--as the newest social problem (Journey Through Rosebud) or as symbolic Vietnamese (Soldier Blue). When the Legends Die is one of the rare movies that seem genuinely to express, even in a small way, the strangled rage and uncertainty of the modern Indian.

It is a tender, graceful fable about a Ute boy who comes finally to a hard-won maturity. As a child, Tom Black Bull lived in the Colorado mountains with his parents. When they died, he went to school on the Indian reservation, lured there by the promise that he would be allowed to instruct the other children in the old ways--the rich rituals and traditions of the tribe that were Tom's only legacy from his parents. The school supervisor, however, had a different idea, expressed with smug official tolerance: "Let him learn the new ways first."

When the Legends Die concerns Tom's later, unsentimental education, mostly at the hands of a feisty, hard-drinking old rogue named Red (Richard Widmark) who signs him out of the reservation school. Red teaches him how to ride broncs and how to fall to up the odds. Together they tour the tank town rodeo circuit, always following the same strategy. Tom (Frederic Forrest) takes a tumble on his first ride, and Red offers high odds on the next event. The cowboys eagerly plunk their money down, and Tom rides flawlessly. It is a profitable little con, but Tom had something more conventional in mind. Fed up, he finally deserts Red and becomes a main attraction at the "big shows" like Pendleton and Odessa. Called "Killer" because he rides the horses way past the sound of the buzzer until they finally drop dead from the strain, Tom takes out all his rage and self-contempt in the saddle.

Millar, a former producer (Little Big Man, Paper Lion) who is directing for the first time, has a good eye for the landscape of the Southwest and a talent for conveying a sense of rootlessness and change. Where Legends works less well is in the concept of the character Red. He is not only supposed to be a father figure to Tom, but to personify the white man as oppressor--a heavy burden for a broncobuster. Millar catches both the affection and the antagonism between him and Tom, but too little passion is generated when they clash. Understated and controlled, the movie would have been better if Millar had allowed more than an edge of anger. Moments that ought to have been direct and dynamic--like Red's death scene--become cursory.

Widmark is in top form and Forrest is a real find, a new actor with the kind of presence and subtle authority that can animate a characterization, not dominate it. Millar makes good use of him, especially in a devastating last scene when Tom returns as a man to the reservation school. "I've learned the new ways," he says, eyes full of grave irony suggesting scars without self-pity. The rodeo champion now wants only to tend the reservation horses, an ambition that suggests both a new awareness and a capitulation, a final defeat. qedJay Cocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.