Les chasseurs de scalps

Trapper Joe Bass (Burt Lancaster) is intercepted by Two Crows and his braves. He is forced to trade all of his furs for an educated slave named Joseph Lee (Ossie Davis). Lee had escaped from Louisiana and captured by one tribe after another. Bass has no use for him as he pursues Two Crows. They track down the Indians and find them attacked by a group of white scalp hunters led by the ruthless Jim Howie (Telly Savalas). The governments are paying $25 for every Indian scalp; men, women, or children. Miss Kate (Shelley Winters) is tired of living on the road with Howie and can't wait to be a Lady in Mexico.

It's a comedic action western. It has its fun. It has its drama. As a buddy western, I would have liked Lancaster and Davis to stay together. I had expected them to run into Two Crows soon after the introduction of the Scalphunters. That's a fun relationship that deserves more time. Sometimes, the comedy is too light. All in all, this is what it is and it's a pretty good western from Sydney Pollack.

The Scalphunters was the first of two films Sydney Pollack directed with Burt Lancaster. In fact according to a recent biography of Lancaster, Burt was literally trying Pollack out on this western before giving him an opportunity to direct the very expensive Castle Keep for him the following year. Personally I think The Scalphunters is a far better film.

It's a rollicking good mixture of comedy with some very serious themes involved. It's also the last time Lancaster did any really athletic roles as he was 55 when making The Scalphunters. We all bow to old age at some point.

Sydney Pollack actually started his association with Burt Lancaster on the set of The Young Savages where he was an acting coach to some of the street kids who were playing gang members. It was his first introduction into motion pictures, he had previously directed and acted in a number of television productions.

Burt is fur trapper Joe Bass who gets an offer from the Kiowa Indians he can't refuse. They'll relieve him of his year's trappings in beaver pelts and he'll get an educated house slave in Ossie Davis. Davis seems born to be a slave, he escapes it from the south, then he's captured by the Comanches who then trade him to the Kiowas and then he's forced on Lancaster.

Lancaster is planning to get his pelts back, but a murderous gang of Scalphunters beat him to it and massacre almost the whole band and take Lancaster's furs along with horses and scalps that bring a good bounty. Burt's Joe Bass is not exactly a boy scout, but this crowd truly nauseates him.

The Scalphunters are headed by Telly Savalas and his cigar smoking refugee from a bordello of a woman, Shelley Winters. Winters has the best performance in the film, this is her third film with Lancaster with whom she had a self documented fling back in the day. Later on Davis gets captured by The Scalphunters and he has to use his wits to survive among them. But they're going to Mexico where slavery has been abolished.

The laughs are mixed in with some serious racial issues all around. Lancaster can't quite accept Davis as an equal, Davis is perfectly willing to go along with The Scalphunters and their genocidal war on the Indians if he'll obtain his freedom through them. And Savalas and his crowd are as mean a bunch as you'll ever see in a film, yet some of the funniest bits in the film involve Winters and Savalas.

The Scalphunters is a really funny western that if you think about it teaches some good lessons we could all use.

Wildly entertaining western romp with the still athletic Lancaster (as a frontier trapper) and Davis (as runaway slave) reluctantly teamed against a band of bandits led by Savalas. I noticed this pic as good time fun during a TV showing as a kid, way way before the nice DVD version, and still have fond memories of an easygoing adventure. Lancaster is exuberant in this, despite being well into his middle-aged years; he still comes across as someone who can outfight any man and rassle a grizzly bear on the side. He also presents an iconoclastic character here, supremely content onto himself, with not much use for civilization OR anarchy (represented by the barbaric bandits). Just leave him to do his own thing; if you don't, you're in for a fight - don't matter who you are, as Savalas and his band find out.

Savalas is great as the bandit leader, dangerous blow-hard that he is; though not too intelligent, he's still a lot smarter than the other idiots under his rule (including a bearded Dabney Coleman in an early role). His main squeeze is the cigar-chomping floozy Shelley Winters, hamming it up as much as the otherwise all-male cast. Davis, in an odd contrast, comes across as the most sophisticated of the whole bunch, despite supposedly being a slave his entire life; he also proves to be the most duplicitous; he's not simply honorable and disappoints Lancaster more than once. Maybe director Pollack was sneaking in some commentary on the outmoded superior standing of the white race by this point, though I think it was wishful thinking that Davis could get away with as much as he does here in the 19th century. In all, the actors prove to be good hams to the very end.

This is a watchable and never boring western for sure. It starts out quite strongly with Davis and Lancaster feuding and exchanging their barbed comments as they make their journey. But the movie soon stops focusing on that, and starts to go off in multiple directions, bringing up new characters and themes that never quite seem properly dealt with. Indeed, the climax seems kind of deux ex machina, and then not long afterwards when the credits role you get the feeling that there are still some things that haven't been properly dealt with.

But as I indicated, it passes the time pleasantly enough. Those who have seen screenwriter William Norton's "The Hunting Party" will get some extra interest, seeing how Norton took several elements from his screenplay of "The Scalphunters" and reused them in that other movie several years later.

I first saw Scalphunters during its original release run in the spring of 1969. The audience' reaction to the scene at the waterhole, Bass and Lee indistinguishable in the mud, and the Indians laughing at them was one of the most raucous reactions I've ever heard at a movie; cheers, applause and much laughter. That is indicative of what makes the film so much better than its title leads one to think. It fairly consistently, and regularly, reverses the stereotypes we have come to expect of films with titles like "The Scalphunters." Bass, the white man, is completely at home in the wilderness, "an ill-mannered, unlettered oaf" to be sure, but highly skilled and fearless. Lee, a runaway slave, is articulate, literate, and completely out of place - not what we would expect of a plantation slave. The exchanges between Bass and Lee as they pursue the Kiowas and Bass's furs, particularly as they eat their first meal together, reveal's the film's real purpose. Bass says Lee ought to retail out for a number of bales of cotton in Saint Louis. Lee asks if Bass thinks it's right to sell a man like that. Bass responds, "Read your Bible." Lee's retort is that, "God didn't invent slavery. The Egyptians did." and "Julius Caesar made slaves out of all you Englishmen." This pointed banter carries on throughout the film, until Bass confronts Lee, who has asked for a drink of whiskey, with "Whiskey's a man's drink, and you ain't no man. You're a mealy-mouth, shuffle-butt slave, so don't be askin' to take no drink with a man." This all culminates finally in their last tit-for-tat struggle, that neither wins - or loses, either, completely unaware of their surroundings and imminent jeopardy, until that last great reversal of stereotype when it's the Indians who ride to the rescue, not the cavalry. The closing image with Bass and Lee riding not only the same, but also the only (and very smart) horse they have, makes a powerful statement about what our common circumstances are, and how pointless racial strife truly is. The film came and went quietly in 1969, I think because the country was not ready to find anything funny about race relations. Chris Rock, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby aside, are we ready yet?