Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

This is my contribution to Scotte1218's Stinky Movie Write-Off otherwise known as the SMWO. Join in the fun...There is plenty of stank to go around.

When I first saw A Man Called Horse in a theater in 1970 I actually thought it was pretty realistic. Having been subjected to ridiculous stereotyping of indigenous people by the Hollywood movie industry for years, it seemed so much better than the standard fare. Recently, I was trying to describe the sacred Sun Dance of the Lakota people to my husband and I vaguely remembered there was a scene of a Sun Dance in this film so I bought a copy. Seeing the film again after 33 years I found it very disappointing. As I will get into later, the Sun Dance portrayed in this film is NOT accurate in either scope or philosophy. This film did not age well and thankfully there have been many better films concerning Native Americans made since this one. (The recent Hallmark TV special Dreamkeeper comes to mind.)

A Man Called Horse, directed with no special skill by Elliot Silverstein (Cat Ballou) tells the story of John Morgan played by Richard Harris, an English aristocrat who, disillusioned with his upper crust life, embarks on a hunting expedition in the wilds of 1825 western United States. He is captured and enslaved by a small band of Lakota under the leadership of Yellow Hand. As a demoralizing joke, Yellow Hand makes John Morgan crawl on all fours, wear a horse blanket and act as a pack animal for Buffalo Cow Head, his shrewish mother, hence the name, Man Called Horse. With the help of another captive, a half Flathead, half French man who speaks some English, Morgan hatches a plan to escape. The plan necessarily takes months and months to come to fruition because Morgan realizes that he is deep in "hostile" country and he could never get past the enemy Shoshone people without being killed. In short, Morgan needs to get himself a war party if he hopes to make it out of Indian country with his scalp intact. Now then, how to get a war party? First off, he has to become a tribal leader some how. He flirts with the chief's beautiful sister, Running Deer, who inexplicably is attracted to this lowly white captive. Yellow Hand will not permit any liaison with his sister because Morgan has not taken the "Sun Vow" so of course Morgan does the sensationalized Sun Vow, proves his manhood and gets the girl. He goes to war against the Shoshone with the other warriors of the band and further proves his loyalty. Over time he has come to respect the Lakota way of life and so it really pains him when his pregnant wife is killed by the Shoshone. He sticks around for a while to help care for the aged Buffalo Cow Head and even becomes the chief of this band after using his superior British Army fighting skills to help the band defeat the Shoshone warriors. He makes his fellow warriors line up in a formation and shoot their arrows on his command! Poor dumb Indians are saved by the strategy and discipline of the White Man. Yeah, right! Eventually, a better man because of his experiences with the Lakota, he cruises and heads 'er back to England...nice chief!

There were several Native American extras in this film...kudos...but Running Deer is a woman of Greek ancestry, Corinna Tsopei, and Buffalo Cow Head is none other than the veddy British Dame Judith Anderson. Even in the 70s there must have been some Native Americans that could have been called upon to play these parts. Typical sexist casting has the Running Deer character looking like she just stepped out of a fashion magazine. Why on Earth this character is ever attracted to Morgan escapes me entirely. She is a beautiful, pleasant woman who is the sister of the chief, for cryin' out loud! She could have any man but she picks the scuzz-bucket horse slave with the snow white skin and fake looking wig.

Acting skills were almost entirely absent from this cast which I blame upon the director whose track record with the Indian character Jackson Two-Bears in Cat Ballou was bad, too.
Personally, I have never been a fan of Richard Harris and even though Camelot in which he plays King Arthur is one of my favorite movies, it is a favorite despite the over-acting histrionics of Harris. This guy didn't even bother to read Harry Potter before he portrayed Dumbledore in the last role of his life and so it's no wonder he didn't even get that plum part quite right. In this film he is just awful, once again over-acting in every one of his scenes. To make matters worse, we are subjected to a long set of scenes with Richard Harris stark naked, having been captured while skinny-dipping, as he gets his blindingly white butt dragged back to the Lakota camp.

Jean Gascon who plays the Flathead-French captive Batise is ridiculously over-the-top and can be said to be comic relief but only if you have a very forgiving laugh-meter. His make-up is truly pathetic. Remember those old fashioned fake suntan products that turned the skin orange? Yep.

Dame Judith Anderson was excellent as Big Mama in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof. She was nominated for an Academy Award in 1940 for her role as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca. In this film she over-acted but, in her defense, the direction here was awful and she's British. I assume she had to trust the director to get this part right and I'm afraid her trust was misplaced indeed. She plays an old Indian woman who is very shrewish and who is constantly beating on poor ol' stinky horse Harris. She looks kind of like Grandma in the Addams Family.

Veteran character actor Dub Taylor plays Joe, the lead hunting guide, and manages to make the character pretty cliche and slap-stick. Fortunately he gets killed right off the bat.

Iron Eyes Cody does a good job of playing the medicine man who conducts the Sun Vow ceremony. This Native American actor played many parts in films throughout the 40s and 50s. His persona has the authentic dignity needed for this role.

The sets of the camp are authentic enough. The scenes of food gathering and the scenes of the burial ground are fairly accurate. The costumes are well done but Richard Harris' wigs are really bad. He has varying lengths of hair as time passes and it never looks like anything but a sandy colored polyester wig being held in place by a strip of leather. The scenes filmed on location in Durango, Mexico are beautiful but this is not the home of the Lakota or the Shoshone so it might just as well have been filmed on location in California.

My biggest problem with this movie and why I think it really stinks is that it sets out to be authentic. It states at the beginning of the movie that it is authentic and that it is based on descriptions from the journals of frontiersmen like George Catlin. Stop right there...authentic but yet it's a film made by white men based on the descriptions of other white men? Well, there you go. The most important ritual of the Lakota people is the annual Sun Dance. It was and is performed for the good of the tribe not as a macho manhood ritual by one individual. It is a ritual of fasting and sacrificing for the benefit of the people. It would never, ever be performed to help someone get a girlfriend! It takes place at the Summer Solstice when the sun is at its apex not just any ol' time somebody wants to prove something. Preparation and purification is carefully undertaken in advance of the ritual. It does involve the painful piercing of the muscles on the chest and back with wooden skewers that attach to leather thongs attached to a central pole about which the men dance while staring at the sun. The ritual lasts for four days. Often visions appear to the dancers as depicted in this film but even that is handled in a pretty cheesy way here. The Sun Dance is witnessed by the whole tribe not just a few men as depicted in this film. The way this sacred ritual was depicted in this film is just plain offensive.

Another scene in the film that is inaccurate shows an old woman being left to die in the cold snows of a harsh winter because she has no son to look after her needs. While the Lakota old ones, in times of poverty and famine brought on by the advent of the white man and the destruction of the buffalo herds would at times go off to die alone rather than burden the tribe, they were not abandoned and left to die, especially in prosperous times when the bands were at peace as in this film. It was an honor for young hunters to hunt for the benefit of the old ones who had no family to care for them.

This film also stinks because once again, the white man is shown to be superior in his logic and his cunning while the Indians are shown to be ignorant savages who rarely smile or laugh and who basically grunt and shriek their language and make war so they can shout and wave their weapons around. One cool thing about this film is that the Indians never speak English during the whole film. They use sign-language and speak Lakota. I recognize several Lakota words and I am assuming that the things I don't understand are accurate but I don't know for sure. At least they don't have the Indian characters talking in pidgin English. At least that much is authentic. The Flathead/French guy, Batise, spoke in an affected French infused pidgin English.

The premise of this film stinks, too. Here's this guy who is disenchanted with his life as a white aristocrat and through a quirk of fate he ends up living as an indigenous person would. He learns so much about these people that he is even allowed to participate in their most sacred ritual. He befriends the chief and marries the chief's sister who he apparently, from all indications in the film, loves. He becomes so much a part of the tribe that he even has a child with this woman. Yet all the while he is secretly plotting to escape and return to England. His involvement and his mastering of the native customs is all part of a manipulative subterfuge. Yes, he supposedly comes to "respect" these people but I find it nonsensical that he would go to such lengths and not be more deeply transformed by the experience. Since the character of John Morgan is the main protagonist in this film I consider my lack of any sympathy toward him as good evidence that the premise is a poor one. This character is an elitist and I couldn't buy the film's suggestion that he had any of the right stuff to pull off the things he does in this film.

This film spawned two sequels, the 1976 Return of a Man Called Horse and Triumphs of a Man Called Horse, neither of which I have seen.

I wouldn't recommend this film to anyone due to its lack of authenticity. This perpetuates too many stereotypes. It also contains some fairly brutal scenes of scalping and killing and the like, not suitable for the kids.












Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age