From the Rental Vault: Autumn and Spies

Whether you're a fan of Western movies or not, it's hard to argue that the glory days of the genre treated American Indians fairly. Much of the time they were bloodthirsty barbarians who had the gall to get in the way of the honest homesteaders trying to carve out a living on the frontier. Sometimes they were completely absent from the story, even if it was set in areas and times in which they had a significant presence. Or they may have been the strange and mysterious "other," inscrutable and unknown because of how alien they were to European-descended civilization.

Director John Ford most often placed different groups of American Indians in the latter role -- they were frequently a way to move a story forward and they performed rote roles that were almost preprogrammed, rather than being shown as human beings with distinct and possibly complex motives of their own. So Ford's final Western, 1964's Cheyenne Autumn, is interesting in not only offering that kind of detailed picture of Indians as human beings but as the more sympathetic group of people in the movie.

Ford based the movie on a 1953 novel by Mari Sandoz of the same name. A group of Cheyenne people are wasting away on the Oklahoma reservation to which they've been exiled in 1877. When the movie opens, they have walked to a nearby fort in order to meet with representatives of the U.S. government. They wait all day in the blazing heat while word comes the delegation turned back because the windy conditions made railroad travel "difficult." With scorn, they walk back to the reservation and prepare to return to their northern homelands, "breaking" a treaty already broken.

Quaker schoolteacher Deborah Wright (Carrol Baker) decides to travel with them, and U.S. Calvary Captain Thomas Archer (Richard Widmark) is tasked with pursuing the Cheyenne to force them to return. Little Wolf (Ricardo Montalban) and Dull Knife (Gilbert Roland) somehow hold some of their people together as they travel through lands now empty of their friends and familiar surroundings.

Cheyenne Autumn is a bleak movie, as it shows a group of people who in essence simply want to go home to die. Both Little Wolf and Dull Knife seem to know their people are vanishing and they want to vanish as who they were rather than as a penned-in camp of beggars. Capt. Archer sympathizes but at the same time knows that if other elements of the Cheyenne people gain control, they might decide to fight instead of peacefully dwindle away. And experience has taught him the Cheyenne fight well. The cast all communicate these different perspectives well, and Ford makes his habitual wonderful use of the wide open spaces of the American West. Even so, Autumn isn't the director's best work. His health declining, Ford was unable to offer some of the nuance that marked his stronger stories. And his decision to include a weird "wacky" interlude with James Stewart as Wyatt Earp is a significant misstep. The studio originally showed the move without that sequence, and skipping it does the movie no harm.

Autumn is interesting enough for its excellent performances and elegiac tone, but also as a hint of what Ford might have done had he offered American Indian perspectives in some of his earlier movies. As that, it's also a little sad as representing a lost opportunity for the director -- who made a point of insuring that local Navajos always got jobs on the sets of his movies filmed in his favorite Monument Valley -- to put that same attitude onscreen more often.

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Since he had first played English spy Harry Palmer in 1965's The Ipcress File, Michael Caine had parlayed that movie's success into leading man status and the award-nominated performance of Alfie. So by the time 1967 came around and he was working on the third Palmer movie with producer Harry Saltzmann, he wasn't as enamored of the role as he was in the beginning.

Part of that could come from the clumsy, mare's nest of a story that is Billion Dollar Brain. Like the two Palmer movies before it, Brain is based on one of Len Deighton's "nameless spy" novels. Deighton's spy picked up a name because a nameless first-person narrator can work in a book, but not so much in a movie.

Harry's retired from British intelligence and working as a private detective. Though his former superior wants him back, he is through with the spy business. Or so he thinks, as a quick courier job leads him into being a potential murder suspect who has to rejoin his old outfit or face charges. The courier caper brings him in touch with his old friend Leo Newbigen (Karl Malden), who has a new boss these days. That boss uses and communicates via a network of sophisticated computers that issue assignments to its agents on behalf of disturbed (and disturbing) Texas billionaire General Midwinter (Ed Begley). Midwinter's desire to thwart Soviet Russia and liberate the captive Baltic Sea state of Lithuania could very well bring about World War III, especially since the computer shares the weakness of all computers in being only as good as the data it's given.

Caine makes a good cynical observer who is a bit taken aback by the madness into which he's found himself drawn, and Malden also does well as the loyalty-impaired Newbigen. Begley is ridiculously over the top as Midwinter, combining the madness of a Bondian "rule-the-world" villain with the subtlety of Major T.J. "King" Kong. Deighton and screenwriter John McGrath make him a cartoon, and Ken Russell directs the way a nose tackle tap dances: stompingly grotesque.

Brain wasn't well-received when it came out, but over time it seems to have gained a better reputation and some re-thinking. This is one case, though, where the initial opinion was more on target than the reconsideration. Sitting through all of Billion Dollar Brain feels very much like a billion-minute ordeal.