Le réprouvé

Wing Foot, son of a Navaho chief, is forced to attend a US Government run Indian school. There he falls in love with the Pueblo Corn Blossom and pledges to marry her. They are separated when she is called home on a pretense and forced to marry a tribe member. Wing Foot soon realizes that he will never be accepted by White society and returns home. After many tribulations, he brings peace between the Navahos and Pueblos and gets to marry Corn Blossom.

One of a number of pictures made in the 1920's and 1930's that put a melodramatic story in an exotic setting.

Unusual for being sympathetic to the Indians, who are poorly treated by the US Government and by most Whites.

Most interesting for showing Navaho and Pueblo costumes and material culture of the time.

It's always a tragedy when a potentially important motion picture is lost and, therefore, can no longer be seen. An even worse tragedy is when an important film DOES survive, and yet is rarely shown. Such is the case of REDSKIN, a superb drama from the late silent era that currently exists in the film archives of the Library of Congress.

The title of the film is not meant to be degrading to American Indian. It refers to the film's hero, Wing Foot (Richard Dix), who is a Navaho educated at the school of white man. In the course of the story he experiences prejudice from both the whites (because of his race) and the Navahos (who disown him because of his upbringing. Thus, Wing Foot is looked upon as neither Indian nor white, but simply a "redskin."

I've only seen this film twice: The first more than ten years ago at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the second in 1999 at UCLA. Other than these extremely rare screenings, REDSKIN seems to have been giving very little exposure to contemporary audiences. To my knowledge, it has never been shown on television, even in this age of cable and satellite channels. Nor has it been made available on videocassette, laser disc, or DVD.

What a tragedy! REDSKIN is an excellent film in many ways - from its production values, to its well-written story, to the effective performance by Richard Dix, the film's talented and now woefully neglected star.

What impressed me when I saw it the first time - an impression reinforced by the second time - was that here was a film that dealt sympathetically with the American Indians in an era of filmmaking that far too many people THINK was one where Indians were shown as murderous savages.

Not only does REDSKIN avoid this stereotype, but it also sidesteps the more contemporary, "politically correct" stereotype offered in LITTLE BIG MAN and DANCES WITH WOLVES. In those films the Indians are generally depicted as being mainly peaceful and morally right, while the whites (save the main protagonist) are seen as the bloodthirsty savages - greedy bigots with little or no redeeming values. Instead of showing the red man as evil and the white man good - or vice versa - REDSKIN presents good and bad in both. The government agent who beats Wing Foot in the beginning of the picture eventually emerges as a decent man - some one who made a mistake and later regretted it. At the end he redeems himself by aiding Wing Foot in his attempt to register his oil claim.

Want more? REDSKIN presents not only the conflict between whites and Indians, but also BETWEEN the Indian races (Navajos and Pueblos are shown to dislike each other). How many other films do this?

If all this isn't enough, REDSKIN is important for its use of Technicolor photography. Roughly two-thirds of this film used color. Although at the time Technicolor had only a two-strip process which could not register the blue spectrum (skies appear white), the red spectrum was fully present, and quite breathtaking in capturing the ruddy hues of the Arizona locations. Color was used for the scenes taking place on the Indians' land, while black and white was used only in the scenes in the white man's world.

REDSKIN has been praised by the late William K. Everson in his book THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN, while in THE WAR, THE WEST, AND THE WILDERNESS, author Kevin Brownlow states that it is a film "long overdue for rediscovery."

So few two-colour Technicolor films survive one breathes a loud sigh of relief that we can still see this beauty in something like its original form. Sadly not all the original Vitaphone discs have survived, but visually the version now available on dvd is a triumph, making magnificent use both of the Arizona landscape and of the frame, the colour remarkably realistic (it does a good job of approximating the authentic blue of Tully Marshall's denims in one sequence) and details like the hero running along the top of a distant mesa pin sharp.

Although craggy Richard Dix as usual looks much, much older than a recent collage graduate, he's otherwise his usual solid self in the title role, and after nearly 90 years the script's treatment of the American Indian stands up pretty well.

Redskin (1929)

*** (out of 4)

Historically important film from Paramount was the studios last silent film but it was also their first attempt at Technicolor. The majority of the film is in Technicolor but there are a few sequences, which are in B&W and this was done after the film's backers realized that it was costing too much to shoot in color so they immediately switched over to B&W. It's also worth noting that the film was originally shown in a 70mm process known as Magnascope but that version is now lost and all that survives is the 35mm version.

Richard Dix plays Wing Foot, a Navajo Indian who is forced as a child to attend a white man's school where he is constantly harassed due to this race. It's at this school where he meets the eventual love of his life, Corn Blossom (Julie Carter), a Pueblo Indian. After the harassment gets to be too much, Wing Foot returns home to see that his people have now turned their backs on him, calling him a Redskin because he's not one of theirs anymore. Even worse is that his love for Corn Blossom is causing problems in her tribe because the Navajo and Pueblo tribes hate one another. As you can tell, race is a very big factor in this film, which I think bites off a little bit more than it can chew. There are a lot of difficult questions asked and the film offers up some unique thoughts but the really bad ending comes out of no where and happens much to fast for all these questions to really be answered. The film runs 82-minutes but I think it needed to be at least twenty-minutes longer just to try and tie up some of the loose ends. Even with that said, this is a very solid little picture that manages to be funny at times but for the most part things are handled very seriously. Dix turns in a wonderful performance as the man caught between two races and another battle with another tribe. This is the first time I've seen him in a silent picture and he actually comes off very good. Carter is decent in her role but not up to Dix's league. I've read that Louise Brooks shot three weeks of footage before being fired and going to Germany so it's a shame she wasn't able to finish the film. There's some very nice cinematography and there's even some nice suspense during the ending even though it's pretty stupid and far fetched. The Technicolor process on this film looked incredible and really seemed a lot better than some of the early Technicolor films that would come out in the early 1930s. While this is a historically important film, it isn't as great as I was hoping for but there's still plenty to enjoy here.

"Redskin" is included in a four disk 48 film set assembled by the National Film Preservation Foundation entitled "Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film 1900-1934", which is available from Amazon.com and others.

In addition to being Paramount's last silent picture and their first color film (using two strip Technicolor), 'Redskin' was also partially filmed using an early 70mm process called Magnascope (see http://www.moviediva.com/MD_root/reviewpages/MDRedskin.htm)

"Magnascope was a special projection technology that used a wide angle, 3 1/2 inch lens to project a dramatically enlarged image (30 by 40 feet) on a screen that was twice the size of the standard Rivoli screen (15 by 20 feet). Non-Magnascope portions of "Old Ironsides" were projected with a 7-inch lens. An illusion of gradual image enlargement was produced by the movement of black masking on the top, bottom, and sides of the screen to reveal more and more of the enlarged projected image." (http://www.in70mm.com/newsletter/1999/59/rivoli/theatre.htm) ...however the aspect ratio of Magnascope was still 4:3.

The first and only road that serves as the access to the top of Acoma Pueblo's 370' Mesa was constructed in 1929 by the Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation for this production.