Cowboys and Indians: What’s This “We,” White Man?

My spouse is addicted to that bad old joke about what Tonto says to the Lone Ranger when they see a band of Commanches galloping toward them in full battle dress.  “Looks like we're in trouble,” mutters the Lone Ranger to his pal. Tonto’s response: “What you mean 'we,' white man?” 

That joke has been in my head ever since Gore Verbinski, Jerry Bruckheimer, and the Walt Disney company decided to do a big-screen version of The Lone Ranger that would put Tonto front and center. Personally, I’m not all that keen to see another film featuring Johnny Depp in weird makeup, but the release of an Indian-centric Lone Ranger has got me thinking about the way Hollywood over the years has portrayed the connection between Native American and paleface characters.

At first it was simple: cowboys good! Indians bad! But filmmaker John Ford, who had a close personal connection with Native Americans and was welcomed by local Navajos to film his western epics in Utah’s Monument Valley, had a more complex view. We can see it in The Searchers, his landmark 1956 tale of an Indian-hater (John Wayne) who goes in search of his abducted niece. A new book by a Pulitzer Prize-winning acquaintance of mine, Glenn Frankel, studies this film in depth. It’s called The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, and I look forward to checking it out. Ford’s elegiac 1964 Cheyenne Autumn was definitely filmed from the Indians’ perspective, but it proved to be a box office bust. (Ford, by the way, continued the common practice of casting as Native American just about any non-WASP who looked suitably exotic, like Ricardo Montalban and Sal Mineo.)

In the late Sixties, when sympathy for the underdog perhaps reached its peak, all things Indian suddenly became trendy. Perhaps that’s why two big films released in 1970 both focus on Caucasians living among Native  Americans. I’m thinking about Richard Harris in A Man Called Horse, about a white British aristocrat who becomes a tribal leader, and Dustin Hoffman, not long after his days as Benjamin Braddock, being raised by Indians in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man. (Predictably, as in most of the era’s Hollywood movies about the civil rights movement – think To Kill a Mockingbird -- a white male drove the action of these films.)

 In 1990, along came a blockbuster, Dances With Wolves, winner of seven Oscars. I found this story of a Civil War veteran who casts his lot with the Sioux nation overlong and sentimental, but I can’t deny the power of its Great Plains cinematography. Happily, such Native American actors as Graham Greene and Rodney A. Grant played major roles. Though Indian activists like the late Russell Means griped about linguistic inaccuracies, the filmmakers did try hard to capture on film an authentic portrait of a vanished way of life.

The success of Dances With Wolves encouraged the ever-creative Roger Corman (always good at jumping on other people’s bandwagons) to come up with his own Native American story. We at Concorde-New Horizons worked hard to produce a script for Crazy Horse, which Roger planned to film mostly in Peru, but the cast-of-thousands demands of this story doomed our efforts. Instead we turned to Michael Druxman’s strong script for Cheyenne Warrior, an intimate love story between a Native American and a pioneer wife which ultimately appeared as a TV movie in 1994. Our handsome and talented leading man? Pato Hoffmann, a Bolivian-born actor with Spanish and German blood in his veins. Oh, well.