Stupid hippy crap


The truth is I actually like it, but... it's totally a product of its time (end of the 60s). The indians are all virtuous, enlightened, and one with the earth. The army/white guys are all bloodthirsty genocidal racists. Talk about heavy handed, they might as well have been been wearing signs that said 'Evil' or 'Good". Dustin Hoffman, the jewish indian, seriously?! It would make a great double bill with 'Billy Jack'.

Now that I've got that out of my system. It's pretty good. I'd give it a 3 1/2 out of 5.

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It is heavily hippie oriented and heavily (Left) handed to be sure, but it's still good.

BTW, Hoffman played a white man raised by Indians. Not an Indian by blood. You are right in that I don't think there were that many Jewish emigrants to the frontier in the 1850s - 1870s.

I don't know who could have been a better choice though... Maybe Michael J. Pollard? He's closer to the book version of Jack Crabb in my opinion.

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This is a historically accurate portrayal of white men, especially as foreigners on this continent. Was there ever a time when white men were NOT genocidal, bloodthirsty, racists?

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Be real nice if your racist post gets reported for hate speech. But the imdb boards are almost extinct. So don't know if I'll bother with it.

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Was there ever a time when people of any colour or gender were not genocidal, bloodthirsty racists? This period was certainly one of the worst in that regard.

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Because it was a much-needed counterpoint to decades of films that justified the near-destruction of Native peoples in the name of Manifest Destiny & Progress. In nearly all of those older films, the only good Indian was either a dead one, or one working for the white man.

As for being a product of its time, why not? Audiences easily drew the parallel between the Native Americans & the Vietnamese people, and saw both wars as illegal & immoral ones. As indeed they were.

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The movie is actually more historically accurate (but not 100% of course) than a majority of the Ford/Wayne Westerns that dominated the American West narrative concocted by Golden Age Hollyweird.

Also, it was absolutely a time of genocidal land grabbing based on a racist ideal known as "Manifest Destiny". Hilter had the same vision for his "Volk" expanding and conquering the Slavs and Mediterraneans. He just had too many powerful enemies who put him in his place. The US didn't have any such enemy getting in its way as other European powers were too busy chopping up and conquering Asia and Africa and Spain was too busy losing its former colonies to revolutions.

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Well said!

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A situation that was not at all unique to Caucasians. The same thing went on all around the world throughout history. Look at the examples of Ghenghis Khan, Shaka Zulu, and the Native Americans themselves, who routinely pushed weaker tribes off their lands and took over huge swaths of territory. The vast majority of NA tribes, and certainly the most prominent and successful tribes, based their entire cultures around warfare. Every tribe's name for themselves meant something like "The Real Humans" or "The First Men". Other tribes were considered subhuman and treated accordingly by Native Americans.

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Same here. I genuinely enjoyed the film. And I get that it was deliberately revisionist, coming on the heels of decades of jingoistic films that supported the idea of westward expansion and manifest destiny. But the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction, and actually promoted a totally ahistorical "noble savage" myth.

Seriously, read "Empire of the Summer Moon." I know it's about the Comanches, not the Sioux or Cheyenne, but they were also a plains tribe, and had a lot in common, including a warlike culture of raiding their enemies -- other tribes, as well as white interlopers to their ancestral lands. Dear God some of the passages are spine-chilling to read. Routine in plains tribal warfare was killing all the adult enemy males who didn't escape -- those not slain in battle were almost invariably tortured to death -- gang rape and either murder or enslavement of adult females, murder of infants and small toddlers (they were apparently considered more trouble than they were worth caring for), and sometimes adoption of pre-adolescents into the tribe, because they were at an age where they could be and often were easy to assimilate completely, and the hard life on the plains meant tribes always had some difficulty maintaining their numbers, so there was a strong incentive to add these children to the tribe.

This movie makes the massacre of the Cheyenne village by the U.S. army look like an outrageous and inexcusable crime -- which it was, of course -- but it totally omits that an attack on that same village by an enemy Indian tribe, or an attack on an enemy Indian tribe by the Cheyenne themselves would have been every bit as cruel and barbaric.

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