Hombre (1967)

Based on Elmore Leonard’s 1961 novel of the same name (reviewed here recently), this film offers an interesting example of adaptation. The basic plot is unchanged, but the screenwriters have introduced and substituted different characters. The result is a rather different story.

Plot. Leonard’s novel revisits the central situation in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). An assortment of stagecoach passengers gets into trouble while crossing a stretch of perilous desert terrain. Instead of a wanted man (John Wayne) who joins them, the pivotal character is a white man raised by Indians (Paul Newman). Instead of undergoing attacks by hostiles, the coach is held up by a gang of thieves.

Leonard's novel

The gang takes a hostage, the wife of an Indian agent, but Newman kills one of them, and a stolen bag of money is retrieved. Set afoot in the desert with little in the way of food and water, the passengers must reach safety before the gang finds them again to reclaim the money—and either leave them to die or kill them outright.

Characters. Newman’s character, John Russell, besides being twice the age of the 21-year-old created by Leonard, seems very close to the man we find in the novel. He is single-mindedly focused on survival—his own. What the others do, whether they stick with him or not, is their own business. Expressing nothing but cold, calm determination, he seems never roused to an emotion.

The Left Handed Gun (1958)

Here’s another one of many screen versions of the story of Billy the Kid. Based on a teleplay by Gore Vidal, this first film by director Arthur Penn may or may not be faithful to Vidal. It surely is not faithful to history.

This time, thirty-three-year-old Paul Newman plays the nineteen-year-old Billy. Like The True Story of Jesse James (1957), the film gives us a painfully confused young outlaw as a protagonist. Two other films from the same period come to mind, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Young Stranger (1957), about alienated young males.

Must have been something about the 1950s. I felt a twinge of it even as a farm boy in Nebraska.

The concept of the film had some promise. What if you forgot about all the previous Hollywood versions of Billy and portrayed him instead as he probably was – an adolescent boy who never had a real father, a lost young soul who was also quick with a gun.

Then let the murder of his father-like employer, John Tunstall, be the motivation to kill the four men who ambushed him. Cast him as an avenging angel, serving his own sense of justice. Alas, taking the law into his own hands gets him deeper and deeper into trouble. First he is badly burned in the torching of a house where he has taken refuge. Then his old friend Pat Garrett goes after him.

The result is a kind of melodrama that’s supposed to feel like a tragedy. Which is OK, but a half century later, Paul Newman’s portrayal of this beautiful loser seems more than a little heavy-handed. The broadness of Billy’s goofy playfulness with his buddies and the scenes of adolescent angst seem styled for the stage. But they feel overdone for the camera.

The film offers an interesting example of how the past gets mythologized. The messiness of historical fact is simplified and understood in terms of the present day. So we get Billy as an alienated youth of the 1950s. While the real Billy might be flattered to be portrayed by the likes of Paul Newman, he’d surely not recognize most of his own story.

History vs. Hollywood. The film portrays the Lincoln County War as a conflict between rival cattle barons – a range war. This is a Hollywood shortcut that sidesteps the complexity of the competing business interests that fought over economic control of the region.

The actual “war” in the streets of Lincoln, New Mexico, was a day-long affair and involved Army troops from a nearby fort. The McSween house, where Billy and the other men were under attack, was a large adobe structure that burned slowly. Billy escaped unscathed under cover of darkness – not badly burned in a sudden conflagration and believed dead, as the film tells it.

The Sheriff Brady killed by Billy was not one of the men who ambushed Tunstall. Billy had killed him in younger days after a heated dispute in a saloon. So when he signed on with Tunstall, he had already killed a law officer – not a street drunk who once insulted his mother, as the film suggests.