It was curious to me that 'Willie Boy' came out the same year that "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" did. Redford looks so much younger here; it must have been the mustache as The Kid. Curiously, he had a similar scene here with Susan Clark as Sundance did with Katharine Ross, a kind of surprise bedroom attack that was used as misdirection before the true relationships became known.

Robert Blake does a convincing job as Willie Boy, on the run from the law with his 'captured wife' after killing her father in self defense. The film offers varying degrees of the racial divides and tensions between whites and Native Americans during turn of the century America. Sheriff Chris Cooper (Redford) treads that line carefully, as he knows he must bring Willie Boy to justice, but is keenly aware that it wouldn't take much for his search party to turn into a lynch mob. All the while, one wonders how the final confrontation might take place, knowing that Willie Boy is not the type to go down without a fight. The prelude to that showdown is perhaps even more of a shocker, as Willie's girl Lola commits the ultimate sacrifice so her man has a better chance of escaping.

I haven't seen Robert Blake in a lot of films besides this and "In Cold Blood", though I was a regular viewer of 'Baretta'. I liked that show, which had a reasonably authentic 'street' feel to it back in the Seventies. I often wondered why Blake never broke out to greater mainstream success until I saw him once on a late night talk show. His entire stint consisted of a rambling rant on government conspiracies and assorted complaints against authority, and he came across like a nut case. It's sad that he wound up at the center of his wife's murder mystery in recent years, a far cry from the once cute kid who graced the screen with the Little Rascals and as Red Ryder's sidekick.