Indian Paint

Our entire family has enjoyed this film for the past 20 years. Two generations of kids have all loved it. Both girls and boys are fascinated by the story and ask lots of questions about the history and culture portrayed. It's a nice change from "cowboy" movies, since it is about Indians (Native Americans) during an earlier time period, before the arrival of Europeans.

I find it hard to believe that I watched this movie being filmed in 1963 on location and have never seen the movie.

I was in a boy's camp that went out for a few days of camping. We ended up along the Brazos River, I believe and the movie company ended up right beside us. Some wild donkeys (or loose donkeys) came into our camp while we were gone on hike and ate our food in camp. The people with the movie company invited us to eat with them and that's how I met Johnny Crawford face-to-face. He was a really nice kid (he was only 3 years older than me) and we all were big Rifleman fans. We ate with him and he talked to us and it was just like a bunch of kids sitting around. He didn't act stuck up or anything. I also got to meet Jay Silverheels of The Lone Ranger fame, who played Crawford's father. I had never seen a movie being filmed before and it was a magical experience for me. The one vivid memory I have is that the Native American actors had rubber-tipped arrows and lances. I couldn't figure out how they wouldn't look rubber in the movie so now I'll have to see the movie and find out.

I waited 42 years to see this movie. My mother wouldn't let me when it came out, and it has been virtually impossible to find it on video until I checked Netflix. I was very fulfilled to be able to watch my childhood hero Johnny Crawford in this movie finally. I'm sure Native Americans would not agree with much of the content in here by today's standards, but by the standards of 1964, it was fairly agreeable. The Indians were fighting one another, and there is no conflict with "the White Man." It's an improbable story of a boy and his horse but I sure enjoyed it. If you watch carefully, the horse, as both a colt and an adult, are played by several different horses.

I have many reasons for liking this film. First, I will admit I heard of it while growing up in a small town in Texas. The filming locations for Indian Paint state that it was filmed in Grand Prairie, Texas and in "Texas" (which, for me, means that there were too many locations to name, but that's just my opinion). But I know specifically of a town where scenes were filmed nearby and that town is Cleburne, Texas.

My older sister (by 10 years) was a young teeny-bopper at the time and knew all about Johnny Crawford and even his brother Robert (Bobby) Crawford Jr. In my small town, even in the pre-internet days, it was no secret that a Johnny Crawford film was being made the next town over. Due to my sister's urging, no doubt, my Dad took her and some of her friends to Cleburne to see if they could find the hotel where the Crawfords were staying.

As there were only so many hotels in town, it wasn't hard to track down and my sister told me of how Bobby Crawford (who was a heartthrob himself for teen girls at the time) saw girls gathering and was playing peek-a-boo with them in and out of the hotel, much to their squealing delight. Meanwhile, my Dad, who could talk his way into many an opportunistic situation, asked a man who was getting into a jeep with a production logo on the side if he could give him a lift to the set. The guy said, "sure," and off my Dad set off towards the filming site. They talked along the way and soon my Dad had to confess that he wasn't part of the film crew. The guy promptly let him out and took off. Back in those days, it wasn't hard to catch a ride (at least in our part of Texas), so Dad got back to Cleburne and met up with my Mom, sister, and her friends. For small-town Texas folk, this was a fun time.

I'd heard that story several times as a kid. Coincidentally, I grew up loving The Rifleman (in reruns) as my favorite TV Western. I didn't really think of Johnny Crawford in the years to come as the same kid that had filmed Indian Paint.

Cut to 1979, and my younger sister got engaged to a guy who was/and is a brilliant Western painter locally. I tagged along with them to visit his family home south of Cleburne and found out that Indian Paint had been partially filmed on their land. My sister's fiancé and his brother even had a small part in the film, but it's one of those "blink and you'll miss it" moments. He showed it to us on VHS and I was just reminded what a small world it is.

As for the film itself, I remember liking it very much for what it was. Not perfect by any means but a gentle, likable family film. Someday I'll try to pick it up on DVD and revel in the memories. Sorry this wasn't as much a review as it was a trip down memory lane for a middle-aged guy.

I watched several reruns of this as a 6th grader in 1975 on local programming in St. Louis, so I'll write my review from a 9 year-old's perspective.

"Indian Paint" is a family-oriented movie about the trials and tribulations of a native-American boy's "coming of age". The characters maintained my interest and the plot was filled with the twists and turns that make a kid's movie thrilling, however far fetched.

The cinematography, costumes, and stunts are typical of the era and I quite enjoyed it. I didn't consider this film a "western", even though it fits the genre in the sense of "the west"-- it's not your typical protagonist / antagonist with villains-type of western.

The relationship between the main character and his horse is so moving that I thought the movie was called "Painted Pony"-- instead, that's a little tune that actor Johnny Crawford sings and hums in the film. I quite enjoyed that and it stays in my memory to this day.

It's not PC to native-Americans, and it's historically incorrect, as many point out, but it's my belief that films like this generated interest for our native-Americans.

I would recommend this for kids / family, as well as adults who are nostalgic or don't mind the un-pc angle. I would definitely watch it with my pre-adolescent kids if I had any ;-)