From the Rental Vault (1968): The Scalphunters

Folks who watch a lot of movies know that sometimes, any hack can make a watchable genre picture. When the genre is something as well-known and features as many automatic sequences as the Western, that can go double. But the best directors, writers and actors use genre pictures not only to tell their stories but to provoke thought about something bigger.

Director Sidney Pollack and stars Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis do just that with the 1968 movie that earned Davis a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actor, The Scalphunters.

Lancaster is Joe Bass, a fur trapper who finds himself outnumbered by a Kiowa war band and forced to "trade" his winter's work for the escaped slave Joseph Lee, played by Davis. Bass trails the Indians with an eye towards getting his furs back, but before he can make his move the band is ambushed by scalphunters -- raiders who slaughter Indians for the bounties the U.S. government has placed on their scalps. The raiders, led by Telly Savalas as Jim Howie, make off with Bass's furs. Now he is on their trail, accompanied by Joseph Lee, tracking them as they reunite with their camp and Howie's girl Kate (Shelley Winters). Bass and Lee uneasily coexist until Lee is taken into the raider camp.

Scalphunters was probably a tough movie to market -- it's certainly a Western, but it's not particularly reverent towards the genre. Protagonist Bass is stubborn and needlessly cruel to Lee. Winters may be The Girl for this movie, but she was nearing 50 when it was made and doesn't bring many of that role's traditional softening touches to the screen. The story's filled with comedic touches and high-energy banter between Lancaster and Davis, but the laughter has a lot of burred edges to it and often bites harder than it smiles.

These factors make William Norton's adaptation of the Edward Friend novel pretty much a dead-on bullseye for Lancaster and Davis. As Bass, the former's detached cynicism brings every bit of bitterness he can muster to the stubborn illiterate trapper. Davis's Lee is a man of natural dignity, gifted with an education by proxy (he had been owned by a very educated family in Louisiana before his escape) far beyond any of the people around him that society has designated as his betters simply based on skin color. Most of the time Lee is untouched by their slighting, knowing himself to be a better man no matter what their attitudes towards him are, but every so often he shows the pain the thousand little indignities cause him and his self-disgust at how easily he assents to it. When he discovers he can in fact assert himself as a man who might rule his own destiny, his joy and wonder are themselves wonderful to see. Davis's own dignity, precision elocution and regal bearing convey just as much of Lee's character as his words.

The Scalphunters is a movie with a couple of things to say, but Pollack and his cast were canny enough to show them to the audience instead of preaching them. That sets it more than a few rungs above a lot of its contemporaries and makes it good viewing even if some of its ideas and part of its message are less of a novelty to us in 2012 than they were in 1968.