User Reviews

This was one of the westerns made in the 1960s and 1970s, including Ford's CHEYENNE AUTUMN and LITTLE BIG MAN which presented the westward expansion as the disaster it was to the Native Americans. Ford's film concentrated to the attempt of an entire tribe to flee to Canada to avoid being cooped up on a reservation. LITTLE BIG MAN looked at the long series of insults and thefts suffered by the Native Americans leading up to the Battle of the Little Big Horn (their great victory over the politically ambitious Custer - in this film - and the point where their doom got sealed). Those films occur in 1876 - 77. TELL THEM WILLY BOY WAS HERE occurs some three decades later (1909), and shows the hopelessness of their situation.

The screenplay is not quite even. It is notable that the author of the original novel, Harry Lawton - who died a few weeks ago - was writing the script with director Abraham Polonsky. This may explain the uneven handling. Polonsky, who was a victim of the Hollywood Blacklist, was notable for his radical point of view (best shown in his 1947 John Garfield film FORCE OF EVIL). But he was an expert screenplay writer, and his view of the rights of Native Americans would be similar to those of Lawton. According to Lawton's obituaries he remained committed to Native American rights and culture throughout his life.

Willy Boy (Robert Blake) kills a man who was bigoted and goaded him. He is pursued by a posse led by Robert Redford, which is determined to get the young man because of his background. Redford, a bit more fair minded, wants to just catch him to bring him to trial, but one gets the impression as the film continues how hopeless this hope is. It would be sort of like Henry Fonda being in charge of the lynch mob in THE OX-BOW INCIDENT to try to control their passions (and probably as unsuccessful).

To confuse matters, the killing takes place near an inn that newly elected President William Howard Taft is visiting on a political trip. Taft's presence in the locale makes the newspaper reporters wonder if they are getting the full facts from the sheriff. Why so much intense searching for this Indian? Is it (as they are told) that he killed a local man and he is quite adept at hiding in the deserts of Utah? Or, is he part of a massive conspiracy of Indians planning to kill Taft? To us, knowing the actual incident, it seems ridiculous, but keep in mind that since 1865 three U.S. Presidents were assassinated for political reasons, the last (McKinley) in 1901. Also, while thirty three years since Little Big Horn, and nineteen since Wounded Knee, the possibility of an Indian uprising was not hard to dismiss (the great chief Geronimo died in 1905, shortly after attending Theodore Roosevelt's inauguration - we were that close in time to the period when he was on the warpath).

The film goes to it's tragic conclusion - a long, hard chase to the death of a representative of a defeated people. But the final victory is Blake's. In the end Willy Boy becomes the legend of the Native American who would not surrender.

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.

While I enjoy this movie very much it has to be said that the history portrayed has been embellished a lot. Polonsky, a victim of anti-communist black-listing, decided to make Willie Boy a hero fighting against the suppression of racist, uncouth white capitalists. The real Willie Boy was very quiet and shy but was also known among the Indians for having an irrational and violent temper. Willie got his whiskey from another Indian who stole the bottle from out of a bunkhouse, not from whites after participating in a bar fight. He did not run away with his lover after being confronted while they were making love. She was terrified of him and he kidnapped her after shooting her father in the face while he slept. He later shot Carlota in the back either when she tried to escape or because she was slowing him down. The only real relevance to the proximity of the US President was that it also meant there was an over abundance of newspaper reporters near San Bernardino and Riverside who sensationalized the chase not even knowing that Willie Boy was already dead before most of them had even heard of him.

The true story of the manhunt (or at the least the closest to the truth as it was based on eyewitness and second-hand accounts from the remaining witnesses) is The Last Great Manhunt by Harry Lawton, the book TTWBIH is based on (Lawton even changed the title to that of the film). Years later a couple of politically correct college professors wrote articles claiming Lawton's book was all wrong and Willie Boy was a hero, even going so far as to suggest Carlotta was killed by the posse. Lawton sued and showed his meticulous research of historical archives and interviews with witnesses. The professors later were forced to print a retraction as part of a settlement.

Conrad Hall's photography turns the harsh, hostile Mojave Desert into the kind of place in which some entrepreneur might build a high-end spa, or a "land developer" might set up a nice, gated community for retirees, with streets that have names like Happy Trail and No Problem Drive and Party Time Cove. Or, come to think of it, a nice strip mall with tony shops like Vuitton and Starbucks and Banana Republic would do nicely.

Sadly, that's what's been happening since the events described here took place in 1909. Dusty little towns like Banning and Lancaster are now sprawling environment engulfers but I digress.

Robert Blake is the Paiute Indian, Willie Boy, who kills the white father of his girl friend, Katherine Ross, and takes off with her into the desert, which Hall captures as a rather benign place with towering Washingtonian palms creating a shady oasis, the breeze whooshing gently through the fronds. There is an abundance of springs and other sources of water.

I guess I'm dwelling on the environment because it's just so damned pretty, while the people in the story are all kind of crass. Robert Redford is Sheriff Cooper ("Coop") who pursues Blake and Ross from one picturesque place to another. Redford's posse is made up of diverse types, as posses tend to be in such movies. One is a hardbitten old Indian killer, Barry Sullivan, who joins the posse because he "enjoys" it. It's just like the old days, fightin' the Comanche.

Redford himself is taciturn, sympathetic to Blake, and a reluctant hunter. But when Katherine Ross's body is found with a bullet through her heart, he's compelled to track down the worn-out horseless Blake and, finally, shoot him in an act of suicide by Sheriff.

This was directed by Abraham Polonsky, one of the famous blacklisted writers who returned from exile. Having been persecuted doesn't automatically turn you into a genius but in this case it's not badly done. Nice shots of Robert Blake running full tilt across the sand, rifle in hand, leaping creosote bushes as if they were hurdles on a college track.

Polonsky's loyalties are clear enough. "What did I do to them?" asks Blake, referring to the white folks. "What did any of us do?" Well, the Paiute were never particularly brutal, not like the Mojave Indians. They didn't have to be. There was enough water around the Colorado River that they could afford to be farmers rather than warriors. Ira Hayes, one of the heroes who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, was a member of the neighboring Pima tribe.

Polonsky, thank God, doesn't revel in White Guilt. The audience is made to feel sympathy with Blake and Ross, if only because these are two lovers on foot being chased by a horde of horsemen who don't understand them and don't want to understand. But that, and a few remarks here and there, are about as far as it goes. If you didn't know Polonsky had been blacklisted, you'd classify this as a more or less typical example of 1960s antinomian values. It's no more propagandistic than dozens of other films that came out of the same period.

And what it finally boils down to is an exciting and ultimately tragic chase movie. The covert message will be happily unnoticed by most younger viewers, and easily ignored by the more sophisticated. See Willie Boy run. See handsome Coop, the epitome of handsomeness, dodge bullets among the stucco-textured rocks. Look at the enthralling beauty of the natural landscape, free of giant tarantulas and mutated ants.

I like movie set later than the cowboy/outlaw era (19th Century), and yet before the great progress (1920 -). An example of one of these films is Bruce Dern in Harry Tracy. This movie was set in 1909. It was at the time that Indians were most vulnerable. There was no certainty they would even survive as peoples. The racism was very clear. Opportunistic white whiskey merchants sell booze to the Indians, but contemptuously mutter racist things about the Indians.

It is probably hard seeing an Italian-American (Blake) play an Indian, and Ross (Irish-American?) playing a half-breed. However, they both pull it off fairly well. Blake plays a character who shoots the white father of Ross's character, and ends up on the run. The ambiguity of everything is pretty good. It is self-defense, because the father sneaks up on him and is raising his gun. But, the impression one gets is one is not sure whether Blake's character is prone to violence or just on the defense. There is a better scene when the sheriff (Redford) finds Ross's character shot dead. But no one knows whether it was murder or a self-inflicted suicide.

Redford's sheriff is ambiguous, too. You don't know whether to like him or not. Most importantly, though, one is aware that he is just barely in control. It is very clear that in a few months, the powers in the jurisdiction may change and make him useless as a sheriff. He is only through his bravery and action oriented personality that he keeps his underlings under control.

The desert as a great hiding place is put to use. This was California, when large towns today were just spots in the desert. The rocks are great hiding places for a person on the run. I was even surprised to find wooded and watery areas, which you won't expect to find in the desert.

I was a little confused by the ending. The sheriff shoots the runaway shooting suspect when he raises his gun. It was ambiguous. Yet, why does Redford's character say that 'he had no bullets'? Blake's character was shooting at him. Was this to mean that the runaway was expecting his death as a fate? I wasn't sure what to conclude.

This is a film that tries too hard to be 'worthy', convinced that it conveys some deep message about the culpability of the White Men who colonised the American West at the expense of the Native American Indians. But, as the Haliwell's film guide puts it, it ends up being 'boringly predictable', with its fashionable downbeat ending and cast of bigoted and unsympathetic characters mistreating each other and creating a situation that will inevitably only lead to tragedy. The actors are all fine, the photography is at times excellent, but we are not made to feel for the characters- we can see the outcome way before it happens. Thus, the final confrontation between Sheriff Coop and Willy Boy had no suspense factor for me- and I didn't care when either he or the Katharine Ross character (no, she did NOT look like an Indian!) died. A much better western that is'revisionist' in its attitude to the Native Americans are 'Little Big Man'. Watch that instead.

. . . tracks down the so-called 1994 "Real Killer" responsible for the Millionaire Boys Club Crime of the 20th Century, TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE offers the next best thing. Like NAKED GUN, this WILLIE BOY Western stars a Real Life Lady Killer, ironically playing the mad dog slayer responsible--either directly, or indirectly--for the female shot dead off-camera. His on-screen exploits include being a literal "naked gun" murderer, as well as an EQUUS-like serial horse murderer. At any rate, the Truism "Justice delayed is Justice denied" does NOT apply to WILLIE BOY (at least in his on-screen incarnation). "Bob Redford" handles "Willie" with Extreme Prejudice in a showdown at Sniper's Perch, not unlike "B. Foster" and "J. Bridges" at the close of HELL OR HIGH WATER. If only Real Life could be so simple, with killers getting their just desserts. However, as soon as some sociopathic bozo picks up his first game show hosting gig, child acting speaking part, gelded awards statuette, or Heisman Trophy, he's suddenly immune to the laws that govern the rest of us, and free to declare "Open Season" upon the "Fair Sex."

Spreading the gap between the white man and the American Native is TELL THEM WILLY BOY IS HERE. This is director Abraham Polonsky's first film in 21 years since his 'banishment'. Willy Boy, a Piute Indian(Robert Blake)kills a man in self-defense and becomes the subject of a manhunt in 1909 California. With him is his lover Lola(Katherine Ross)trying to stay one step ahead of a posse led by Deputy Sheriff 'Coop' Cooper(Robert Redford). Being a 'savage', the deck is stacked against Willy Boy...his accusers of course assuming his guilt.

Talent shines in this sage brush drama. Redford and Blake are excellent. Ross is so easy on the eyes you forget she has talent. Other standouts in the cast: Susan Clark, Barry Sullivan and Charles McGraw. This may be thought of as a thinking man's western.