★ 5 / 10
Great desert scenery, modern filmmaking and great cast
Wuchak
Great desert scenery, modern filmmaking and great cast, but it absurdly rewrites history Loosely based on the true story of the West’s last famous manhunt in…
Great desert scenery, modern filmmaking and great cast, but it absurdly rewrites history
Loosely based on the true story of the West’s last famous manhunt in 1909, a Chemehuevi-Paiute Indian named Willie Boy (Robert Blake) kills a man in self-defense and escapes into the desert wilderness with an Indian woman (Katharine Ross). They are pursued by a posse led by Sheriff Cooper (Robert Redford). Meanwhile, residents of the region are preparing for a visit from President Taft.
Redford was in his prime after his breakthrough success with “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) and the outstanding “Downhill Racer” (1969). “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here” came out next and was critically acclaimed. While a modest hit, it failed to achieve the success of the other two films, especially “Butch Cassidy.” It has since fallen into nigh obscurity and is almost never mentioned in ‘Best Western’ lists.
Along with “Hombre” (1967) and “Butch Cassidy,” and soon-to-come Westerns like “The Missouri Breaks” (1976), “Willie Boy” ranks with the breakthrough ‘modern’ Westerns of the 60s-70s. The movie is polished and hardly seems to have dated after all these decades. The director was an admitted communist who was blacklisted by the McCarthy squad in the late 40s and “Willie Boy” was his big return to filmmaking.
The cast is great, also including the stunning Susan Clark as a patronizingly liberal white missionary, and the desert scenery is spectacular. But the first half is dull and the story doesn’t perk up until the 50-minute mark. Still, this is a worthwhile late 60’s Western if you like the style of the others noted.
What lowers my grade is the LIEberal rewriting of the historical facts in order to gel with the Indian-as-tragic-victim theme that was fashionable at the time. The real Willie Boy was in his mid-20s and kidnapped the 15 year-old Isoleta, his second time, after murdering her father in his sleep. Willie Boy used Isoleta as a pack animal and, when she couldn't walk any more, shot her in the back. Her clothes were shreds while her skin had swellings & bruises and there were cactus needles in her body. Her shoes were worn out and her feet bloodied.
Willie Boy ultimately committed suicide with his last bullet and his corpse was found after the part-Native posse chased him for eleven days and over 500 miles in the picturesque wasteland. In short, Willie Boy was a piece of sheet who executed two of his own; and yet this movie has the audacity to make him out to be tragic figure oppressed by righteous authorities. Why Sure!
The film runs 1 hour, 37 minutes and was shot in the deserts of S. Cal (Banning, Pioneertown, Joshua Tree, Riverside, Palm Springs, Whitewater and Lake Sherwood).
GRADE: C
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★ 7 / 10
"One way or another, you die in the end."
classicsoncall
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…
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.
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thanks!!