Last week I kicked off my multi-part series of essays on Native Americans in Horror Films with a discussion of the key First Nation Fright Flick gimmick of sacred burial grounds and the violation of, leading to dire consequences and untimely, Indian-themed deaths.  Today we segue from karmic comeuppance to Vengeful Indians of the Mostly Flesh and Blood Variety.

Wronged Natives, if not quite vengeful ones, go way back at the movies, at least as far back as 1934.  In First National’s MASSACRE, directed by Alan Crosland, Richard Barthelmess plays Sioux rodeo performer Joe Thunderhorse, a flashy $300-a-week trick rider and crack shot who has assimilated – and how! – to the white man’s lifestyle.  Upon the death of his chieftain father, Joe returns to the Spotted Eagle Reservation to find his people shackled by local corruption and galloping prejudice.  There’s a compelling social conscience underneath all the cocoa powder troweled on the white actors and the film’s title earns its keep in an impassioned speech spoken by the protagonist late in the film.

You used to shoot the Indian down. Now you cheat him and starve him and kill him off by dirt and disease. It’s a massacre, any way you take it!

Joe even takes his case to Washington but ultimately he has to resort to violence (lassoing one cahootser – future Charlie Chan Sidney Toler) and dragging the man to his well-deserved death.  The fadeout finds our hero a fugitive from white justice.  If Joe has lost his stature in the white man’s world, he at least has inherited his father’s mantle as tribal leader and dropped his lily white Chicago girlfriend for a brown-skinned local girl (Ann Dvorak in redface – but it’s the thought that counts).  Moving forward through the 20th Century, Native Americans were rarely the protagonists of feature films (unless the characters were children or played by Elvis); yet if they were by some small miracle given narrative prominence, you can bet there was violence in the mix particularized by a savagery that was coded by the filmmakers as inherited, inbred and (even when justly applied against oppressive) as terrible as it was essentially Indian.  In NAVAJO RUN (1964), Italian-American director Johnny Seven cast himself as halfbreed Navajo Matthew Whitehawk, who is rescued from the bite of a rattler by local rancher Warren Kemmerling… who wants the First Nationer hale and hearty so he can hunt him for sport, MOST DANGEROUS GAME style.  This is how the cards had to be stacked in order for a redskin to make a righteous kill of a paleface.  In Sergio Corbucci’s Euroater NAVAJO JOE (1966), Burt Reynolds plays the survivor of an Indian massacre perpetrated by whites who lives to exacts a brutal, methodical revenge.

NAVAJO JOE is pretty grim stuff, chockablock with $1 scalpings from end to end.  In his superstar days, Reynolds would often site this as his worst movie ever.  Park Cherokee on his father’s side, the actor played a number of Natives early in his career.  He had a recurring role as halfbreed blacksmith Quint Asper on the long-running CBS series GUNSMOKE, was an Iroquois investigator for the New York District Attorney’s office  in his own short-lived ABC series HAWK (which ran to 17 episodes in 1966) and was a modern day Papago on the hunt for his brother’s killer in the downbeat ABC-TV movie RUN, SIMON, RUN (1970).

I suppose we have Tom Laughlin and Delores Taylor to thank for the run of Native American avengers who turned up in increasing numbers after the success of their drive-in classic BORN LOSERS (1967), whose unexpectedly titanic returns funded the couple’s pet project, BILLY JACK (1971).  Common to these two films and two subsequent sequels, THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK (1974) and BILLY JACK GOES TO WASHINGTON (1976), Laughlin’s soft-spoken half-breed ex-GI only killed when it was absolutely necessary (and when he was really, really pissed off).  Subsequent Vengeful Redskins weren’t quite so discriminating and their acts of revenge pushed the story lines squarely into the realm of horror, which ties these characters vis a vis their innate mercilessness to the evil “Injun Joe” of the assorted film adaptations of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  In William Grefe’s swamp-set STANLEY (1972), a Seminole Vietnam vet (Chris Robinson) hits the war path when a shifty leather goods merchant (THE GODFATHER‘s Alex Rocco) tries to grab (Cruella de Ville-style) his found family of slithery serpents for the luster of their hides.  Gnarly and gross (at the height of his righteous indignation, Robinson’s angry loner throws rattlers like Ninja stars), STANLEY is chowder headed in the extreme but remains good grindhouse fun despite being an insult (as one critic put it) “to Vietnam vets, Seminole Indians, snake aficionados, strippers and wallet manufacturers.”  The protagonist (Puerto Rican actor Victor Mohica) of William Allen Castleman’s JOHNNY FIRECLOUD (1976) is arguably more justified in his ire, lashing out as he does against the bigots who have enslaved, raped and murdered members of his tribe.  Produced by exploitation king David F. Friedman, the film takes an obvious cue from BILLY JACK (the protagonist is, once again, a Vietnam veteran) but dials the violence up to 11 with Johnny becoming (in the words of the film’s theatrical trailer) “a one-man, all American Indian massacre.”  JOHNNY FIRECLOUD is brutal and bloody with Johnny’s fury particularized by a Navajo Joe style hatchet to one dude’s head, by scalping, by burying another dude up to his neck in sand so buzzards can peck his eyes out and by putting yet another dude’s head in a bag full of rattlesnakes.  The film is also noteworthy for providing an acting role for Sacheen Littlefeather.  Littlefeather had made an infamous appearance at the 1973 Academy Awards broadcast on behalf of Marlon Brando, who refused his “Best Actor” Oscar for THE GODFATHER (1972) due to his disgust at the treatment of American Indians related to the Siege at Wounded Knee, which had occurred only weeks earlier.  Sacheen Littlefeather was later be revealed to be a Mexican national named Maria Cruz, the 1970 winner of the Miss American Vampire contest.   That was actually the only Miss American Vampire contest ever held, being a publicity stunt to promote Dan Curtis’ HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS (1970).

It’s worth noting that midway through the BILLY JACK cycle, Michael Winner’s DEATH WISH (1974) legitimized out-and-out vigilantism in the craggy personification of Charles Bronson, for whom the best defense was clearly a good and unflinching offense.  The role was a significant change of pace for Bronson, who played his fair share of Native Americans in the movies, and was cast by Winner as a citified, wimpy architect whose wife and daughter are raped by street thugs – resulting in the death of the former and the vegetative meltdown of the latter.  Bronson’s suppressed rage is unlocked when he travels out west for business and witnesses a tourist trap gunfight recreation, which sends him packin’ back to Manhattan to rain down retribution on the ignoble savages who haunt the New York Transit System and the more shadowy corners of Central Park West.  A year earlier, THE DEADLY TRACKERS (1973) told a somewhat similar tale set in the 19th Century Texas.  Begun by Sam Fuller but finished by Barry Shear, the violent oater sends distraught pacifist lawman Richard Harris (who had gone native a few years earlier as A MAN CALLED HORSE) after the murderers (Rod Taylor, Neville Brand, William Smith, Paul Benjamin) of his wife and son.  Rather than being made whole by the crucible of redemptive violence, Harris is destroyed, gunned down by Mexican lawman Al Lettieri (in a rare nice guy role), his triumph over his adversaries a Pyrrhic victory.  Guess which movie spawned four sequels and a proposed remake?

Not all Vengeful Indians were righteous, of course, at least in the eyes of Hollywood.  In Robert Mulligan’s THE STALKING MOON (1968), a white survivor (Eva Marie Saint) of a long-forgotten Apache massacre of settlers is captured ten years later by the United States cavalry along with the son she bore from repeated rapes by the savage Salvaje (Nathaniel Narcisco).  The woman makes an attempt to return to civilization through the kindness of retired Indian scout Sam Varner (Gregory Peck), only to have Salvaje dog her tracks and slaughter everyone between him and his male heir (Noland Clay).  Salvaje is rarely seen throughout THE STALKING MOON and is glimpsed only fleetingly, as if he’s a literal monster.  (Mulligan and cinematographer Charles Lang even stage a clutching hand shot, as Salvaje appears suddenly where he cannot possibly be and advances in tried and true monster-and-the-girl fashion.)  The evidence of Salvaje’s cruelty is also tastefully rendered, leaving most of his atrocities to live on in the oral tradition of the Anglos:  “Last I heard of Salvaje he was clear down to Window Rock.  He took on ten troopers down there.  Killed four of them and not a one of them got a look at him.”

As with MAJOR DUNDEE (1965) from Sam Peckinpah and ULZANA’S RAID (1972) from Robert Aldrich, THE STALKING MOON puts across the notion of American Indian as Serial Killer, whose crimes are as brutal as they are preternatural.  “You won’t hear him,” it is said about Salvaje.  “It doesn’t happen that way.  He just comes.”  His relentlessness and nasty habit of slicing guys’ faces off puts him somewhere between Hannibal Lector from THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) and Michael Myers from HALLOWEEN 2 (1981), who cuts a wide and bloody swatch through Haddonfield, Illinois, in search of his kid sister.  A comparison to THE TERMINATOR (1984) would also not be entirely out of line, with most of the descriptive dialogue concerning Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T1000 (“You still don’t get it, do you? He’ll find her! That’s what he does! It’s all he does! You can’t stop him! He’ll wade through you!”) being equally applicable to Salvaje.  In the end, however, Peck prevails (albeit at the cost of every single one of his friends and neighbors), Salvaje is vanquished, and order is presumably restored to the New West.  While our sympathies are certainly with the leading man and leading lady, a modern viewer might prefer to categorize THE STALKING MOON as a guilty pleasure due to its exploitative depiction of a Native American father searching for his son as a remorseless killing machine.  Compare this to Ron Howard’s THE MISSING (2003), in which homesteader/healer Cate Blanchette’s teenage daughter is kidnapped by a necessarily evil Indian witch doctor (half Inuit actor Eric Schweig, a former Injun Joe) to be sold into white slavery in Mexico.  Heroism comes in the form of Blanchette’s estranged father (Tommy Lee Jones), who has “gone Indian” and manages to outfox the redskins in a violent but upbeat finale.

More interesting than its A-plot is THE STALKING MOON‘s depiction of the result of frontier rape, which finds Eva Marie Saint traumatized but devoted to her halfbreed son.  The violation of white women by Indians, whether implicitly or explicitly etched, was a recurring motif in westerns going all the way back to D. W. Griffiths’ THE BATTLE OF ELDERBUSH GULCH (1914) but is typified genre-wide by a moment in John Ford’s STAGECOACH (1939).  As Apache renegades circle the eponymous conveyance and appear to have the upper hand, Southerner John Carradine pulls a derringer with the intent of mercy-killing sweet young (white) thing Lucille Platt, to spare her “a fate worse than death” … but what specific fate are we talking about: sexual trauma or the likelihood that she will be used to corrupt the white bloodline?  The notion of killing a woman to preserve her purity became such an archetypal chestnut that it was reused in the climax of the non-Native American-related horror film ISLAND OF TERROR (1966), directed by Terence Fisher on a break from his regular duties at Hammer Studios.  As goose-necked monsters spawned by cancer research gone awry slither by the dozens towards the town center of an island off the coast of Ireland, scientist Edward Judd considers the wisdom of giving his heiress girlfriend Carole Gray a lethal hypodermic jab.  He even gets a nod of consent from colleague Peter Cushing but is spared the white man’s burden by the triumph of science and the last minute destruction of the bone-sucking silicates.

In Richard Compton’s oft-retitled THE RANSOM (aka MANIAC!, aka THE TOWN THAT CRIED TERROR, aka ASSAULT ON PARADISE, 1977), a buckskinned sniper begins taking out the town fathers of a cozy little Arizona backwater named Paradise … by arrow, by bolo, by buck knife… until it is revealed that he is no Indian at all but a former Olympic hopeful (Paul Koslo) who went to Vietnam instead of Munich and returned stateside with “a cosmic explosion” going on inside his head” (according to the Roger McGuinn-Patrick Ferrell ballad that closes the film).  Distributed by New Line Cinema, the production is a bit of a head scratcher, with ripe performances phoned in by Oliver Reed, John Ireland, Stuart Whitman and Jim Mitchum, son of Robert, whose character has a Native American grandfather but seems in no discernible way a Native (despite being retained by Reed’s boozy soldier of fortune as a tracker.  It’s interesting that the killer’s first victim is a Native American cop but that’s about as far as the irony goes.  There’s obviously something here about the white man’s exploitation of the west but subtext goes south in favor of cat and mouse antics and chase scenes.  (Around the same time, Oliver Reed played a comic Indian in Don Taylor’s THE GREAT SCOUT AND CATHOUSE THURSDAY, who schemes to destroy the white man by infecting his women with syphilis.)   A far more conceptually interesting Vengeful Redskin appears in an otherwise lifeless exercise, Michael Gornick’s CREEPSHOW 2 (1987).  In the anthology film’s first vignette, “Old Chief Wood’nhead,” thugs who terrorize and eventually murder Mom-n-Pop grocers Dorothy Lamour and George Kennedy are brought to ground by the general store’s wooden Indian.  No, the episode and the film in general are not very good but this offering does bring a twiggy twist to the mythical archtype of The Golem and it’s great seeing Holt McCallany’s vainglorious Sam Whitemoon pulled by his luxurious black hair to his well-deserved demise.

In the Canadian CLEARCUT (1991), directed byPolish emigre Ryszard Bugajski, Graham Greene (fresh from his success in DANCES WITH WOLVES the previous year) plays an Indian rights advocate who abducts the manager of a local paper mill and the Toronto lawyer who lost an appeal on behalf of the Ojibwas to stop logging on sacred Indian land and brings them into the woods for something a bit more intense than tree hugging.  As the movie, and the violence, progresses, Greene’s character is suggested to be less a flesh and blood mortal than a mythical trickster spirit, the  Wisakedjak, conjured from the subconscious of the young lawyer during an earlier scene in a sweat lodge and personified out of festering white guilt.  There’s a neat throwaway line midway through the film as the lawyer is asked by the imperiled mill manager “Can you handle your Indian?” and the unanswered question hangs in the air between them, heavy as smoke.  The lesson here is that most North Americans clearly cannot handle their Indians, which is to say they cannot accept that the price of the New World was the destruction of the existing one.  As such, the spirit of the First Nation lives on in contemporary myth-making in the form of indigenous threats to the physical world or as a way to combat a spiteful antiquity through the employment of forgotten rituals paved over by the steamroller of modernity, monotheism and Manifest Destiny.

Pt. 3 of this essay will appear next Friday.

Special thanks to a number of colleagues who helped with materials or observations during the writing of this piece: Paul Gaita, Stephen Bissette, C. Courtney Joyner, Bill Cooke, Kim Newman, Robert Richardson, David Konow, Craig Blamer and Howard S. Berger.

Special thanks also to my part-Shinnecock wife, Barb,  for her love and support and for giving me two blue-eyed savages.  The beat goes on.