Willie Boy

I consider Robert Blake's performance in this movie to be one of his best, and this comes from someone who has always thought he was a fine actor. Robert Redford, too, shines here as the sheriff, and almost all the supporting cast keeps up with the two male leads.

Blake's character is a Paiute Indian who is the object of a manhunt which is sensationalized by the press because of its concurrence with a visit by President Taft. The sheriff is pressured into hunting down the Indian and the girl he loves but whose father has forbidden the match.

It's a good solid early-1900s Western with much better-than-average acting. But it's not so much an action film as it is a character study -- of Blake's character and, to a lesser degree, Redford's. It brings to life the racism and exploitation that white Europeans brought with them to America.

After a couple of decades on the blacklist Abraham Polonsky returned to mainstream cinema with a Romeo&Juliet type story. The Mojave Desert don't look a lot like medieval Verona, Italy but the story is the same.

The title role of Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here is played by Robert Blake who is a Paiute Indian kid who by their tradition kidnaps the women of his intentions Katherine Ross to make her his bride. It's their way of courtship, but when Ross's dad objects he's accidentally shot and killed by Blake.

Ironically with a good lawyer Blake might have gotten off. But Paiute Indians usually don't get good lawyers and they don't take to confinement. Still this incident might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that the sitting president of the USA in 1909 one William Howard Taft was visiting the area. That brings in the national media and blows up the story.

Robert Redford plays the sheriff charged with bringing in Blake dead or alive. He never played quite the roughneck character he does in this film than in any other work I can recall. Susan Clark plays the doctor on the Paiute reservation who has her views routinely ignored as she's mansplained on a regular basis. She also has her needs fulfilled by Redford as both are the best of what's out there in their corner of the world.

It's Blake and Ross who really capture your attention. I'm sure that William Shakespeare would have seen so readily the parallels between his timeless classic and what Blake and Ross are all about.

In southern California at the start of the twentieth century, a young indian man gets into a violent dispute over a girl. This triggers a manhunt.

Director Abraham Polonsky was making his comeback to mainstream cinema with this film, eighteen years after being blacklisted by the UnAmerican Activities Committee. He also wrote this screenplay, which strikes a defiant note in favour of the lone hero against the forces of intolerance and repression. It is not too fanciful to see the indians, with their alternative sensibility and distinct code of values, as a metaphor for artists and free thinkers. Minorities are always in danger, suggests the film, from the urge to hound and victimise manifested by some elements in society.

Polonsky skilfully uses the camera to tell his story. We follow the complex movements of the various characters around the fiesta fairground without the need for spoken dialogue. The silent meeting of Coop and Willie tells us everything about these two men, and their mutual rivalry and respect.

The wonderful topography of the Mojave Desert is superbly captured in Panavision. In particular, the showdown on Ruby Mountain offers some gorgeous images. The film's four leads are excellent: Robert Redford is a wise and humane Coop, the sherriff obliged to lead the inappropriate manhunt: Robert Blake is perfect as the nihilistic, elemental Willie: Doctor Elizabeth Arnold is played by Susan Clark, developing nicely the ambivolence of a woman who needs Coop sexually but despises herself for it: Katharine Ross is the spry, athletic Lola, the young indian girl who becomes Willie's 'wife by capture'.

Here is the true account of this story as told by posse member Law-man Ben de Crevecoeur in 1941.

Willie Boy was a 25 or 26 year old Paiute Indian. Isoleta Boniface was a 15 year old Paiute Indian girl. Isoleta's father, Old Mike Boniface was a Paiute Indian.

Willie Boy had an unrequited interest in Isoleta. Her father didn't like Willie Boy. Willie Boy kidnapped Isoleta the first time from the family's camp at Twenty-nine Palms, Ca. Her father found them, took her back and told Willie Boy that if he came near her again he would kill Willie Boy.

Some days later, after drinking with a White friend, Willie Boy went to the Gillman Ranch, near Banning Ca., where the Boniface family was working and crept up on Old Mike, his wife and their 7 children where they were sleeping under a Cottonwood tree. Willie Boy shot Old Mike in the head as he slept.

Willie Boy kidnapped Isoleta again and headed into the desert. He used her as a pack animal to carry whatever supplies he had. The posse, some of which were Paiute Indians, came upon a message scrawled in the dirt from Isoleta that read, "My heart is almost gone, I will be dead soon". When she couldn't go any further, Willie Boy shot her in the back and killed her.

Lawman Ben Crevecouer said, "The sight of that girl's body was something a person would want to forget, but couldn't. We came on it while it was still warm. Her clothes were just rags, she was welts and bruises all over, and there were cactus spines in her flesh. She had worn through her thin little shoes and her feet were raw and bloody".

The posse eventually discovered Willie Boy's body after chasing him for 11 days and 500 to 600 miles in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties in Ca.. Willie Boy killed himself with his last bullet.

Willie Boy was just a scumbag who murdered two of his own people but ,of course, this director, Abe Polonsky, turns the story into another anti-White Hollywood propaganda film.

Info from interview of Ben de Crevecouer in "Desert Magazine", Nov. 1941.

the first time i saw this movie i was a pre-teen, and it always haunted me. i think it should have gotten a much higher rating also.

yes, it raises all the cross-culture misunderstandings, thats what makes it so tragic and so good. it makes you stop and think before you make that next assumption about someone you don't know....whose culture your only vaguely familiar with..not a bad thing to do today, then or anytime.