![]() Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is McCabe & Mrs. Some spend their lives trying but always fall short. “It is not often given to a director to make a perfect film. Director Robert Altman himself called it an “anti-western” for its deliberate shredding of some tried-and-true conventions of the genre, and the film still stirs up arguments among western fans 50 years after its debut. Miller, starring Warren Beatty as a gambler with higher aspirations and Julie Christie as his drug-addicted partner in a bordello. Perhaps the year’s most controversial release was McCabe & Mrs. But Lancaster made both films worth seeing. Revenge stories in the classic tradition like Shoot Out with Gregory Peck and One More Train to Rob gave longtime western fans the fix they needed The Hired Hand, directed at a snail’s pace with a cynical sneer from Peter Fonda, likely sent many home shaking their heads.īurt Lancaster worked both sides of the trail that year: Valdez Is Coming was a fine adaptation of an Elmore Leonard tale, while Lawman, in which he played a marshal as morally ambiguous as the men he pursued, blurred the line between good guys and bad guys. For every old-school western like Catlow, starring Yul Brynner and based on a Louis L’Amour novel, there was a Zachariah, billed as the first “electric Western” for the inclusion of several rock songs performed by Country Joe and the Fish. Made for a minuscule $800,000 budget, Billy Jack would earn $32.5 million, and nearly $100 million internationally.Īnd so it went in 1971. Of course, we conveniently ignored the fact that Tom Laughlin, the actor who played Billy Jack, was definitely not Indian.” “… We Indians cheered as Billy Jack fought for us, for every single Indian. I mean, back in the day, Indians worshipped Billy Jack,” Alexie wrote in a 1998 article in the Los Angeles Times. Native American author Sherman Alexie recalled his whole tribe piling into a couple of vans and driving six hours to see the film in Spokane, Washington. Billy Jack was a Native American, Green Beret, Vietnam War veteran who preached nonviolence before beating his enemies senseless with a Korean martial art called hapkido.Ĭritics yawned and shrugged, but there was something in this reluctant Indian warrior, and in Laughlin’s laconic but effective performance, that resonated with younger viewers who also felt like outcasts in tumultuous times. The vision of writer-director-star Tom Laughlin, it expanded the legend of a character introduced four years earlier in an otherwise forgettable biker flick called Born Losers. Reviews were mixed (“scarcely distinguished but certainly enjoyable” was the Los Angeles Times assessment), but a rousing climactic shootout sent Duke fans home happy.īig Jake earned about twice in ticket sales what it cost to make, a success by any standard, but one that paled next to the year’s second highest-grossing film, Billy Jack. Wayne played a rancher on a quest to rescue his kidnapped grandson, played by Ethan. In Big Jake he was joined by his most beloved female costar in Maureen O’Hara, his two sons Patrick and Ethan, and old friends like Harry Carey Jr. John Wayne, still tall in the saddle 32 years after attaining stardom in Stagecoach, was enjoying a career renaissance after winning the Oscar in 1970 for True Grit. ![]() In 1971 the genre was in the midst of a transition, in which new visions of the Old West clashed with more traditional fare featuring stars audiences had revered for decades. In 1971, traditional ( Big Jake) and revisionist ( Billy Jack) westerns battled for box-office supremacy.įif ty years ago, if you were in the mood for a western, there was probably one playing somewhere in your neighborhood but it might not be the kind you were expecting. ![]()
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