L'étalon de guerre

The other commenters have written interesting things, indeed. The start of the movie had a reference to it being set in 1830. That is not "post-Civil War". It is thirty years before it. The setting is even a decade and a half before the Mexican-American War, thus being prior to the U.S. conquering what is now the southwestern United States and seizing it from the Mexicans. Pike was not a "cowboy", but rather a fur trapper, and it was the Indians who stole their pack horses and gear who killed his partner, with an arrow. Pike did not murder his partner. The setting was all wrong. The primary fur sought by the trappers was beaver, used mainly for the fashionable top hats of the eastern United States and Europe. The Europeans had already exterminated the beaver in much of its range in Europe due to over-harvesting. Beavers do not live in a desert, nor do any other furbearing animals that were being sought.

The picture tells the odyssey of a cowboy called Pike (Martin Sheen) whose partner, a white trapper , (Harvey Keitel), is murdered by Indians. Later on, he steals a white mustang called "Eagle Wing" to a Kiowa Indian. Having stolen a white mustang, he's pursued by an Indian, White Bull (Sam Waterston), who retrieves it and vice versa, going on and on a relentless manhunt .Pike pursues him to get his horse back. He then chases him to get his horse back through a long cat and mouse game . Meanwhile , the Indians attack a stagecoach with passengers (Stephane Audran and John Castle as a priest whose role was offered to Trevor Howard) and abduct an attractive girl. A Mexican posse (Enrique Lucero , Claudio Brook ) set out to track down the savage raiders . The west, the way it really was, before the myths were born!.

Solid western with great loads of action, chases and violence. From movie initiation when happens the horse robbing until the moving final, the fast-movement and western action-packed are continued . The pic is a crossover of various films , the white woman kidnapped by Indians just like ¨The Searches¨ (by John Ford) , the battle against nature from ¨Man in the wilderness¨ (Richard C. Sarafian) and ¨Jeremiah Johnson¨ (Sidney Pollack) and obstinacy and stubbornness between two merciless enemies who fight with no rest such as ¨The duelists¨ (Ridley Scott). The magnificent main cast is formed by an excellent Martin Sheen (Apocalypse now) as tough and two-fisted rider obsessed to recover the slim and graceful horse. Sam Waterston (Killing Fields) in a rare role as Comanche is very fine, as well. Sensational supporting cast featured by European actors, -this is a British production by Rank Organization- such as : Stephane Audran (Claude Chabrol's muse) and John Castle (Lion in Winter) as the priest. Besides , Mexican actors (Jorge Luque , Claudio Brook, Enrique Lucero, Jorge Russek), because being set in Mexican frontier and shot in Durango, Mexico, that's why some known Mexican actors were hired . Splendid cinematography by cameraman Billy Williams, it is wonderfully shown on spectacular landscapes . Lively and thrilling musical score by composer Mark Wilkinson.

The motion picture was well directed by Anthony Harvey (Lion in Winter). However , the picture was a flop and barely obtained money and failed really at box office; nowadays , being better considered than the past when it premiered. Rating : 7/10 . Above average Western , it will appeal to Martin Sheen fans .

The whole thing seems like a very beautiful film school exercise, the rehearsal for a real film, or the cuttings from another film, picked up off the floor and edited into a... well, not a cohesive film, but certainly something.

Story is hardly there, or nonsense, and at one point has a couple of threads that I guess come together, to no particular purpose. Other threads are dramatically brought up then entirely dropped just as they reach their zenith.

The whole film is really like that. The most beautiful, well-scored, emotionally-moving, and generally sensible part of the film is the last few seconds, and the scene that plays out under the credits. No, not being insulting to say "credits were the best because it's over." I mean, there's a scene there, and it was the one time the movie really worked.

Too bad it took the better part of 2 hours to get there.

Also: Sam Waterston as an Indian. Sigh.

This splicing of THE SEARCHERS is one of the weirdest films I've ever seen, filmed by a Briton in a strange, unfamiliar Mexico. It's often said that the best films about America are made by foreigners, who can approach the familiar with an outsider's eye. But this crackpot film is something else. Though set ostensibly in post-Civil War America, this isn't an America recognisable from myth, cinema, TV etc. The film has an air of timeless fable about it, while dealing specifically with Western mythology.

Director Harvey uses the title horse as a focus for interconnecting stories, all dealing with the traditional Western clash of the primitive and civilisation. The former seems to have the upper hand. The vast scrub and desert of the film's landscape is unbroken, ripe for allegories of the mind. The only brief sites of civilisation are a stagecoach of missionaries and landowners, and their hacienda, from both of which derive behaviour that is anything but civilised.

The basic story intercuts three stories. In one, an aimless deserter, Pike, having lost his trading partner, steals a miraculous horse, Eagle's Wing, so-called because of its grace and speed. In the second, an Indian, White Bull, owner of this horse, waylays a stagecoach, and kidnaps one of its female occupants. In the third, the Spanish men sent to find her ignore this quest in favour of a murderous, plundering spree.

Although a revisionist Western, the treatment of the Indian is problematic. Unlike Pike, his character is never explained, forever inscrutable, denied a voice, except for an excruciating snatch of song. When he's not a strange Other, he's a symbol, whose role isn't entirely worked out - at one point a savage brute, at another he epitomises nature and freedom.

But Pike notes at the beginning that the film will attend to the period of primitivism before civilisation. In many ways the film resembles 2001 - A SPACE ODYSSEY, especially its opening sequence. Part of the film's power lies in the connections made between the three disparate characters, forcing us to view the mythic struggles and quests in a different light. Indian culture and Catholicism is linked by superstition, ritual, greed and murder. Both Pike and White Bull are musical and alcoholic. White Bull is demonised by both Pike and the abductee as a 'bastard', unwittingly revealing the tactic of illegitimacy used by colonising whites who infantilised the natives, becoming themselves 'necessary' fathers.

Unlike a traditional Western, concerned with making history, civilisation, and progress, this film is a double detective story, interrogating the past, tracks, remains.

What gives this film its remarkable uniqueness, I think, is, despite Maltin's racism, its Britishness. The climactic stand-off is more like an Arthurian joust. The film itself bravely eschews dialogue for the most part, creating the kind of visual and aural tapestry Malick missed in THE THIN RED LINE, and something few Hollywood directors would have dared. The existential doubling and quest motifs are more European myth than American (resembling another British Harvey Keitel movie, THE DUELLISTS).

Most astonishing is the use of nature. Most Westerns use landscape as an awe-inspiring backdrop: there is little sense of actually living in the West. In many ways, EAGLE'S WING is like a Powell and Pressberger film, with nature a powerful, pantheistic character in its own right - alive, dangerous, hostile, beautiful. There is a sublime scene reminiscent of A CANTERBURY TALE, when jewellery left as a trap by White Bull in the trees is suddenly blown in the wind: there is a haunting, tingling, magical, thrilling effect more reminiscent of the Arabian Nights than a horse opera. Heartstopping.

After a slow first half, which seems to have suffered from some heavy-handed cutting, the second half of this striking Western is a fascinating struggle between Indian and white man for the possession of a magnificent horse (the "eagle's wing" of the title). The film's two main assets are Billy Williams' magnificent cinematography and a beautiful music score by Marc Wilkinson.

Watch out also for a moving and unexpected graveside poetry reading by Sheen. This was one of the last major films produced by England's Rank Organization.