The Scalphunters

This 1968 film from Sydney Pollack is, on the surface, a conventional Western, but it doesn't take a graduate student to quickly see that it fits in the revisionist school of oaters that were popular during the sixties.

Taking place in antebellum Texas, Burt Lancaster plays a trapper who is held up by a band of Kiowa, who steal his entire winter's worth of furs. They offer him a runaway slave they have captured from the Comanche. This slave, played by Ossie Davis, is highly educated and has a tremendous gift of gab. He and Lancaster make an entertaining duo as they verbally spar.

Lancaster tracks the Kiowa, but he watches helplessly as they are slaughtered by a band of scalphunters, white bounty hunters who sell the scalps. They are led by Telly Savalas, who is traveling with an ex-whore turned astrologer, Shelley Winters. Lancaster and Davis then start shadowing this group, with Davis hoping for freedom and Lancaster wanting nothing else but his furs.

The film is somewhat comic in tone, with the dialogue witty and the action slapstick. In addition to the pleasure of watching good actors like Lancaster and Davis perform, the Savalas-Winters pairing, which sounds dreadful on paper, is actually pretty funny. They are like the Ralph and Alice Kramden of the West. Davis carries the picture, though (he got a Golden Globe nomination) as the slave who knows Latin and Greek and is able to talk himself out of almost any situation.

Of course this film offers social satire, as it was contemporary with the tumult of the Civil Rights movement. That Davis is the smartest character in the piece is consistent with other films of the era, like In the Heat of the Night, that bent over backwards to portray racial inequality as barbaric. That Lancaster and Davis will grow to have a mutual respect is certainly a given as the picture progresses, but it still fun to watch.

As for Pollack's direction, it is first-rate, with comic and action sequences handled deftly, and getting great work from his performers. It is also very straightforward, unlike the war picture he would next, which I'll write about tomorrow.