The Scalphunters
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Movie Reviews of The Scalphunters
Movie Review: "But your Joe Bass!..You can move mountains!..You'll be alright!"
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a great action/comedy western with Burt Lancaster as Joe Bass. Elmer Bernstein's bouncy musical score sets the stage for this not so typical western film. Joe Bass starts off to sell his years worth of furs when the Kiowas show up and forcefully exchange the furs for a run-away slave named Joseph Lee(Ossie Davis)...Joseph had taken up residency, after running away from the plantation, with the Comanches until the Kiowas raided and slaughtered the Comanches capturing him in the process. Joe Bass of course doesn't want him and so they set off to retake the furs. In a display of misadventures, the furs are in turn taken from the Kiowas by the Scalphunters led by Jim Howie(Telly Savalas).
The continued misadventure of chasing after the furs, combined with a great budding relationship between Joe Bass and Joseph Lee, make this movie very enjoyable. Lee is far more educated than Bass and he is doing his best, with whatever and whomever is available, to escape off to Mexico and finally be free from Joe Bass, the Kiowas and Jim Howie.
Rounding off this movie's cast is Shelley Winters..in one of her more enjoyable roles..as Jim Howie's girlfriend Kate. The Sunday scene of her and her girls singing Eliza R. Snow's great Mormon hymn 'In Our Lovely Deseret' as Jim Howie tries to recover from his hangover is hilarious. Taken as a whole this is a very enjoyable movie and well worth adding to any western collection.
Movie Review: The Scalphunters
Summary: 4 Stars
After being coerced by a roving gang of Kiowas to trade his season's worth of hard-earned furs for a runaway slave, Joe Bass (Burt Lancaster) vows to take back what's his. Before he can get them, though, the Kiowas are slaughtered by a gang of `scalphunters' led by Jim Howie (Telly Salavas), who nips Joe Bass's furs in the bargain. With Joseph Winfield Lee (Ossie Davis) in tow, Joe Bass trails the fur and scalp-laden Jim Howie and vows yet again to reclaim his property.
THE SCALPHUNTERS (1968) is a comedy-western that somehow manages to makes palatable some terrible things - specifically, slavery and the harvest and sale of human scalps. It doesn't condone them, of course, but it doesn't dwell on their horrors, either. Lancaster is energetic and perfectly cast as the savvy fur trapper who is determined to get what's his back again. Salavas and Shelley Winters as his trail moll, are pretty good, as well. The heart of the thing, though, is Ossie Davis as the erudite slave who seems the only person to see the big picture, as it were. As he'd prove a couple of years later with `Jeremiah Johnson,' director Sydney Pollock is deft at handling offbeat action movies. THE SCALPHUNTERS is a fun movie that merits a strong four stars.
Movie Review: Entertaining Lancaster Western
Summary: 4 Stars
In 1968, it was appropriate that a western dealt with race relations, and The Scalphunters does so with action and humor.
Burt Lancaster plays Joe Bass, a trapper who is headed towards civilization with months worth of pelts and furs. He runs smack into a tribe of Kiowas who don't appreciate Bass trespassing on their land. They take the pelts, but exchange them for a runaway slave, Joseph Lee, played by Ossie Davis, who the Kiowas had taken from the Comanches. Lancaster doesn't want Joseph, and Joseph wants to get somewhere where he can be free, but they team up to relieve the Kiowas of Bass' pelts.
Before they can spring their plan to steal back the pelts, the Kiowas are attacked and slaughtered by scalphunters, roughneck types who get paid for each Indian scalp they turn in. The scalphunters take the pelts, and that's when the real fun begins. The Scalphunters are led by Telly Savalas, who brings along his constantly complaining girlfriend, played by Shelley Winters.
The Scalphunters has humor, action, and wry commentary on the relationships and perceptions of whites, blacks, and Indians. It's good that this rarely seen film is now on DVD.
Movie Review: Pollack directed the film with a sense of humor unexpected in the genre...
Summary: 3 Stars
"The Scalphunters" opens with an illiterate frontier fur trapper named Joe Bass (Burt Lancaster) refusing to trade his furs, with the Kiowa Indians, for a runaway field slave... But at the end, he is forced at gunpoint to do that and Bass finds himself, in one moment, the owner of Joseph Lee (Ossie Davis), an escapee from Louisiana, formerly of the Comanche tribe, until stolen by the Kiowas...
Lee, an African--slave by employment, black by color--results one of the highest educated families in Louisiana, who can read and write... Lee's intention was to circle south, as far as Mexico, because the Mexicans have a law against the slavery trade...
Bass' immediate plan was to catch up with the Kiowas and get back his pack horse and furs... But his plan soon failed when a band of scalphunters led by a dangerous double-crosser, Jim Howie (Telly Savalas) attack the poor Indians killing almost all of them and taking, by the way, Bass' property... Bass-- a man who moves mountains to get what he wants-- stampedes their wagons and makes the scalphunters' horses dangerous to ride...
The sweetest, and in some ways the funniest moments come out when Bass talks to his horse... In one scene, he gets so excited, and turns back to his stallion saying: "By god, you have got an idea!"
Telly Savalas makes Kojak a charmer, but in Pollack's film he is a psychopathic bounty hunter who slaughters a dozen Indians...
Kate (Shelley Winters)--a cigar-puffing doxy qualified to do things to any man--is sick about her lover's wagon... She complains that she lives like a squaw... Kate's dream was to live like a lady in a fancy house with servants... Winters delivers the best line of the whole movie when she exclaimed at the end of the film: "What the hell? They're all men."
Ossie Davis comes out with a real sense of humor... In one scene he explains to Kate the benefits of the common cactus, known to the Comanches as Maguey... He makes her believe that this plant was used in the ancient times by the Queen of Sheba to restore the natural oils to her beautiful blond hair...
It was nice to see Nick Cravat in a modest role as one of Savalas' men... As you remember, Cravat was ideally cast as Lancaster's sidekick, Piccolo, in the flamboyant "The Flame and the Arrow" in 1950, a spoof of the Robin Hood genre, set against the castle battlements and banquets halls of medieval Lombardy...
Movie Review: "Scalp hunters. The wickedest, crookedest trade to ever turn a dollar."
Summary: 3 Stars
Once quietly groundbreaking for its racial politics - Ossie Davies' escaped slave is by far smarter than any of the film's white characters, quite a bold move for a mainstream movie even in 1967 - seen today The Scalphunters is one of those films that's enjoyable but never quite as good as it could be. Former IRA gunrunner turned screenwriter William Norton's almost Dickensian dialogue in the first third of the movie is so good that it's a shame that the plot separates Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davies for so long and while it makes some smart points about racism along the way there's a feeling of the film almost running down rather than building up to a climax. Still, Elmer Bernstein's score is one of the best ever written for a Western, alternatively rousingly vivid, jauntily amusing and lyrically likeable, and the film has its charms.
MGM/UA's US DVD includes the theatrical trailer and 2.35:1 widescreen and fullscreen versions of the film.