A Bluray of Abraham Polonsky‘s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here pops on 1.2.19.
A well-written, well-honed, humanistic adventure-drama that offers full and absolute respect to Robert Blake‘s titular Native American character, Willie Boy doesn’t cut it by today’s p.c. standards because Blake and particularly Katherine Ross, who plays Willie’s Chemehuevi-Paiute bride, are ethnically incorrect. If he were alive today, the once-blacklisted Polonsky would be experiencing a second political shunning. The p.c. zealots would be saying, “Why didn’t you insist on authentic Native American actors to play Blake and Ross’s roles? It was made 49 years ago, we realize, but still…shame on you.”
The below clip reminds me of what a graceful, agile, first-rate physical actor Robert Redford was when young — he was in the athletic league of Burt Lancaster in the ’50s and ’60s.