A MAN CALLED HORSE: UNDERSTANDING INDIANS

In the early seventies there was a ton of movies released that all dealt with the west from the perspective of the Indians. While we had been raised with movies that had savages attacking women and children for so long now we were presented with a group of humans who weren’t the devil incarnate but just people who were different. Movies like LITTLE BIG MAN and SOLDIER BLUE came out. And in 1970 we had A MAN CALLED HORSE.

Richard Harris stars as John Morgan, an English nobleman who has left his homeland for a time and come to America. Out in the Wild West, he’s enjoying a hunting trip that is suddenly disrupted by a group of Sioux Indians that attack his camp, kill and scalp his guides and then capture Morgan.

Naked and dragged behind a horse with a rope around him, Morgan is taken back to the Indian’s camp and treated like the lowest of low. They view him as little more than a dog going so far as to keep him tied near them.

As time passes, Morgan begins to learn about the Indians and their ways with the help of Batise (Jean Gascon), another captive who has learned how to speak their language but can also speak English and French. Through the translations Batise provides Morgan learns about his position in the tribe as a captive and also how they live their lives, how they differ from the lives led by English nobles.

A day comes when the village the tribe lives in is about to be attacked by two members of another tribe. One of the boys takes out the first and Morgan leaps to attack the second, killing him with his own knife. As the boys scalp the first one, Morgan realizes to become accepted he must follow suit and does so to the second attacker.

Morgan becomes accepted among the tribe and must earn his place among them. Throughout his stay he has caught the eye of Running Deer, the sister of the tribe’s leader, Yellow Hand. He makes an offer for her hand in marriage but is rebuffed by Yellow Hand until he can complete the Sun Vow, a torturous physical ordeal the men of the tribe go through to prove their bravery. Morgan does complete the task and is united with Running Deer. It is perhaps the images of this ceremony that most will recall when thinking of this film, a scene where hooks are inserted through Morgan’s chest muscles from which he is then hung from the ceiling.

A MAN CALLED HORSE was a different sort of western than had been seen before. As I said earlier, rather than being presented with the actions of this tribe as uncivilized men we are instead offered a look at them through their eyes. The things they did might have seemed savage to us but in their culture it was totally acceptable. This film attempts to make that plain and understandable.

The scenery in the film is gorgeous and one would think that with this being released now on blu-ray that it would be breathtaking. But the fact remains that while blu-ray may offer an amazing new look to most things it can only reprocess what there was to begin with. Without a high quality print or if the film were shot less than perfect, no amount of transfer to the blu-ray format will change what was originally shot.

The acting in this film is well performed by all. Harris does a fine job portraying a man who was more lost before his capture than he was after. Early scenes have him describe his life in England that present him as being out of touch there even though he accepts it. His scenes of life with the Indians later on seem to present him more in touch with himself.

Many never think about the life of the Indian or what they went through. You rarely even hear it spoken of today. And while Hollywood fluctuates between presenting them as either complete animals or noble savages, the fact is that perhaps they were like the rest of us, somewhere in between. This movie does its best to present that.