The Last Warrior

Anthony Quinn - Flapping Eagle
Shelley Winters - Dorothy Bluebell
Claude Akins - Lobo Jackson
Tony Bill - Eleven Snowflake
Victor Jory - Wounded Bear
Victor French - Rafferty

The Last Warrior was based on Claire Huffaker’s novel Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian, a crudely pro-Indian, sentimental comedy about a rebellious Paiute named Flapping Eagle, what appeal this novel could have had for Carol Reed is a mystery. Where Reed's humour is refined, Huffaker's is coarse; where Reed's subject matter is cosmopolitan, Huffaker's is regional; where Reed's irony is nimble, Huffaker's is cumbersome. For whatever reason, he chose to subordinate himself to the flimsy material Huffaker gave him, and the film he made keeps its nose glued to the well-worn path of the original plot. In the aftermath of Oliver!, a sizeable investment in a Carol Reed film clearly made economic sense to American studios, and Warners put up $6 million, a significant bankroll for 1970.

The movie's early scenes strive to establish the miserable, degrading conditions under which the Indians are compelled to live. Yet Reed, who had compressed the sufferings of Welsh coal miners and Irish revolutionaries into a dignified and affecting shorthand, here renders every feature of social oppression in heavy black lacquer. Apparently Reed's characteristic restraint could not be exported to an Indian reservation in Santa Clara, New Mexico, where the picture was shot. There we meet demoralised Indians caught helplessly between two cultures. Broke, underemployed, disparaged, socially adrift, they console themselves with firewater. Irony is also a form of solace, though their minor acts of deception against their tormentors seem trivial. Their chief commercial outlet is the Silver Dollar Trading Post, where the shelves and racks are choked with Indian knickknacks. A condescending white woman coos over a doll and, as we learn, gets just what she deserves: something 'made in Japan'. Most of the whites are strictly effigies of middle America, as sneering and mean-spirited as their counterparts in blaxploitation movies, but the true villain of the piece is Officer Rafferty (Victor French), a local policeman. Rafferty treats all Indians with the same impartial contempt and sadism, the only exception being Flapping Eagle (Anthony Quinn) or 'Flap', a disgruntled war hero for whom he reserves a special loathing. Flap is a natural leader, the most potentially subversive Indian around, and hence the biggest threat to a cop's sense of social order.

The suffering of the Indians is demographically uniform, cutting across all ages, sexes and levels of education. Eleven Snowflake (Tony Bill), an articulate, educated young buck and Wounded Bear (Victor Jory), a leathery old sage with a diploma-mill law degree, fare no better in the local society than the misfit Flap. Nor are the tribal elders any help: the nominal heads of the reservation are supinely obedient to the white authority figures from nearby Phoenix.

Despite this melancholy subject matter, the style and tone of The Last Warrior is predominantly comic. Reed and Huffaker may have hoped to create the same unusual creative tension Reed had achieved in his many earlier attempts at the seriocomic, but whatever the director's motivation, he encourages the worst excesses in his players. Quinn is drunk and disorderly all over the neighbourhood, but particularly at his favourite spot, a brothel run by his girlfriend, coyly named Dorothy Bluebell (Shelley Winters). His loud, inebriated speeches about the mistreatment of the Indians are supposed to be warm and winning, but they merely seem flatulent. Winters is as egregiously colourful, foul-mouthed and boisterous as ever, a grotesque tornado of a woman, the Earth Mother from Forty-Second Street. Her shrill, Amazon-sized jealousy over Quinn's infidelity is one of the played-out comic veins from which Reed tries to quarry a few laughs. She knocks Quinn down at one point, and when he points to her own sexual conduct and complains of her hypocrisy ('But you do it every night'), she thunders back, 'Yes, but I'm a professional.' Other similarly misbegotten attempts at humour include the sight of Quinn emerging from a bathroom buttoning up his pants and a trick horse who throws riders on cue and surreptitiously drinks Flap's whisky when the Indian isn't looking.

The dramatic and comic spine of the story is the discovery by Wounded Bear of two arcane government treaties, which finally allow Flap and his followers to convert their festering discontent into insurrectionary energies. Their first major counterattack is to halt a nearby construction crew, which is disturbing the reservation, by pretending the crew is desecrating an Indian burial ground. A clause in one of the treaties provides that Indians can claim any object left unattended on the reservation. After a railroad car they have furtively released one night rolls onto the reservation, the Indians jubilantly proclaim it theirs and transform it into a 'long, thin apartment'. We are meant to experience merry exultation in the Indians' pranks, which baffle and thwart the establishment.

Reed gets no better results when he shifts abruptly from comedy to melodrama two-thirds of the way through his film. After an epic fistfight between Flap and Rafferty (bedecked with such subtleties as Flap enveloping his antagonist in an Indian blanket), Flap flees on horseback. The chase climaxes in a duel between Flap and a pursuing helicopter. At its climax, Flap doesn't even have a flicker of a smile on its face. One of Laughing Bear's treaties reveals that Phoenix is actually Indian property, and Flap leads his people into the city to assert their rights. The townspeople are incredulous and unreceptive until the charismatic Flap conquers them with a display of oratorical eloquence that creates a reverential, almost mesmerised silence. But causes need a martyr - so goes the eternal left-wing credo - Rafferty assassinates Flap. As in so much proletarian literature of the 1930s, hope and courage survive in the fallen leader's lieutenant - in this case, Eleven Snowflake - who tells the chastened white people that the Vanishing American won't vanish until justice has been done. Like his name, Flapping Eagle remains a true and irrepressible insignia of his country.

Examined in retrospect, The Last Warrior seems wholly a product of the 1960s. Theoretically, the moviegoers of 1970, many of whom were fresh from civil rights marches, could respond with indignation to the predicament of the Indians. The humour, although it has the subtlety of a tomahawk, does take direct aim at the lowest common denominator, a philosophy that has worked often enough. Moreover, with superstar Anthony Quinn turning in one of his exuberant, roistering hero-peasant roles, the box office insurance must have looked decent. The critics were quick to advise the company on what a poor investment it had made, filmgoers clearly agreed with the majority critical view on The Last Warrior, and, after a brief flurry of bookings, the picture was withdrawn from circulation.