Hombre

When this came out at the heighth of the Vietnam War it was hardly promoted, certainly placed second-bill, and the promoters took heat for picking an Anglo in the starring role.A waste of his blue eyes. However, like vintage wine, this has received the respect it deserved.Well,written and depicted credibly by an all-star cast, Frederick March, Martin Balsam, Diane Cilento, Frank Silvera, (against image)Richard Boone and one of Newman's early co-stars, the lovely Barbara Rush.The existential elements are certainly there in full force. John Russell(Newman)half-breed inheritor of property wants nothing with materialism, or his adopted race. Self-reliant, stoical, seething with resentment, he boards the stagecoach with a bunch of hypocritical phonies,opportunists and a couple of tenderfoots. A couple hours on the road, trouble occurs. When the dust settles you have met one of the most unforgettable western characters, John Russell, who has taught white man what honesty,courage,ethics and religion has not to that point. Second, to Russell, in character and substance is Diane Cilento's character. Russell at the last second, took that opportunity from her to make his stand, and their last glance at one another acknowledged that.Cilento's part, gets passed over by reviewers,yet, hers was finely etched. She was used and cast aside by a local deputy, but she picked herself right up and went on, like Russell, proud and inwardly tough as nails to accept her fate. One afterthought about the fudged edit job when Russell shoots the head off one of the robbers. I believe it was painted in while editing,lingering a couple frames too long;that could be redone with special effects easily today.No matter. It is one hell of a western,paced naturally against the vogue of spaghetti westerns who were reaching for high art.Well-scripted, masterfully directed. Believable.

This was an unusual Western (made precise or coincidentally) in those awful times of repression, bigotry and ideological intemperance, that remarked the ambivalence of values that may reside in the core of an untamed spirit unlinked to any Ideology (the mythic essence of a hero).

With visible resemblances respect two previous movies Ford `s Stagecoach, and Samuel Fuller' s The broken arrow, the film focuses around a white man who is raised by Indians (the hidden inspiration for Dance with wolves, perhaps).

The final shoot out between the god guys and the outlaws talk by itself. An ambitious film that surmounts the mere adjective of a simple Western.

If you grew up in the 50's & 60's, then you know that Westerns were the preeminent commentaries for the state of American society during those times. I first saw this movie while in college and needless to say, I still feel its effects today. Paul Newman's role really bothered me at first because how could a man who had endured so much hatred and bigotry, sacrifice his life for a group of people who saw him as lower than dog doo (I'm being nice)? I thought he was stupid to do so. As I've grown older, I began to see all the grey areas in the movie's plot. All of the characterizations are first rate and the casting is superb. Newman's John Russell is one of the most complex and at same time sympathetic characters to me that he has ever portrayed and for me, one of his best. After watching this movie, I never saw westerns in the same "good guy vs. bad guy" light again. I am grateful for the enlightenment.

Once one gets past the shock of Paul Newman portraying an Indian, this settles into being a very good western with a great cast, including Fredric March and Martin Balsam. Newman plays John Russell, a half-Indian, half-White man who is living a peaceful tribal life until he inherits a boarding house. When he sells it, the landlady (Diane Cilento, who at that time was Mrs. Sean Connery) and several tenants are out on the street. Fate lands Newman and this unhappy bunch on the same stagecoach out of town, and that stagecoach is subsequently robbed and the entire group left in the middle of nowhere. Despite their resentment toward Russell, the others are forced to depend upon him for survival. Despite his ambivalence toward White people, Russell is drawn by a sense of decency into their dilemma.

Much of the film centers around moral debates between Cilento and Newman. To its credit, the movie paints no easy answers to the questions it raises, and manages to be interesting and exciting, not merely didactic. Newman is good, Cilento is excellent, and the ending is unexpected and poignantly underplayed. An underrated film.

The 1960s were a transitional time for the Western genre. Like every other film genre, it proved that it wasn't immune from the great political and social turbulence of that decade. One of the best, but strangely also one of the most overlooked, is the 1967 film HOMBRE, which does a very good, if slightly cerebral job of delivering a "message" without heavy-handedness or preachiness.

Based on one of Elmore Leonard's many novels, HOMBRE stars Paul Newman as John Russell, a white man abandoned by his parents as a child but raised by Apaches in Arizona who comes down from the reservation to "rejoin" white society. His uncle, recently deceased, has left him a boarding house. But despising the white man's treatment of the Apache (whom he feels much closer to), he instead rides out of town on a stagecoach captained by a Mexican driver (Martin Balsam). During the journey through the Arizona desert, other people riding in the coach force him to ride on the outside with Balsam--another indication of the prejudice turned at him for being what he is.

But when they are robbed by a gang of outlaws, led by Richard Boone (a superbly nasty heavy if ever there was one), the passengers, including an Indian agent (Frederic March), all realize that Newman may be their best and last chance for survival, especially since Boone has kidnapped March's wife (Barbara Rush). The end result is a sort of cynical variation on John Ford's 1939 classic STAGECOACH (deliberate on the part of Leonard), where there are no true heroes in the end, only an understanding of the way people act and the way they expect to be treated.

Filmed primarily on location in the desert around Tucson, Arizona, HOMBRE is a bit slower-paced than most people would like to see in a western, but it has more than enough good points to keep things interesting. Newman delivers an incredibly low-key performance in which the disgust he feels inside for the white man's world is never expressed through shouting but a sort of cynical dialogue with people. Diane Cilento is the woman who tries to get a bit of humanity out of the cynical half-breed; and Balsam, although some would say is miscast as a Mexican, gives a good enough performance as Newman's one link between his people and the white man.

Martin Ritt, who had worked with Newman before on several films, notably the contemporary 1963 western HUD, directs with assured vigor, and James Wong Howe's widescreen cinematography, showing the barren Arizona landscape, is among the best ever done in the western genre, especially for the 1960s. Although something of a "message" movie, HOMBRE's message is well in keeping with the decade in which it was made, and is never delivered in a hamfisted fashion. It was an overlooked film in its day, but its recent restoration to DVD makes it an impressive piece well worth seeing.