The Scalphunters Sale
OscarÂ(r)-winning* director Sydney Pollack delivers a "rousing good show" (The Film Daily) with this fast-paced western full of "irresistible humor" and "delightful ironies" (MotionPicture Herald). Starring OscarÂ(r) winners** Burt Lancaster and Shelley Winters along with Telly Savalas and Ossie Davis, The Scalphunters is "a lively, ribald and unpredictable pleasure which carries the western into new country" (Los Angeles Times)! When trapper Joe Bass (Lancaster) is bushwhacked by Indians who steal his fursand leave him a runaway slave (Davis) in exchangehe's determined to get his property back. But when the Indians are attacked byoutlaws, Joe and his unwanted companion must join forces to retrieve the furs in a startling, action-packed journey of self-discovery that concludes with one of the "all-time cinematic comeuppances" (Citizen-News)!
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The Scalphunters Customer Review
Sydney Pollack's "The Scalphunters" (1968) is a briskly-paced, revisionist Western with an entertaining script and equally entertaining performances by a strong cast. Given the title, some viewers may expect a serious and gritty drama about the depraved scalp hunters who plagued the American West. However, in actuality, this well-written light-hearted film is a clever blend of both comedic and dramatic elements.
The story is complicated, yet easy to follow: Joe Bass (Burt Lancaster) is a grizzled, Bible-reciting fur trapper with a monomaniacal attachment to his beaver pelts. Held up by Indians, Bass is forced to exchange his pelts for the tethered Joseph Lee (Ossie Davis), an escaped slave who formerly served an educated family in Louisiana. Bass and a reluctant Lee pursue the Indians but, through a twist of fate, Bass' furs fall into the hands of scalp hunters led by Jim Howie (the always engaging Telly Savalas), a burly ruffian henpecked by his prostitute-girlfriend Kate (a fussy, cigar-chewing Shelley Winters).
It is the latter performances which is the key to the film's success. Lancaster, Davis, Savalas and Winters effortlessly spin out humorous performances. And the best scenes are the humorous ones, such as when Savalas yells at Winters' to stop singing those damn Mormon songs or when Savalas defiantly tells Lancaster that he will kill him then steps on a cactus while returning to the wagon.
Yet for all its amusing tomfoolery, the film has a message: The axis of that message revolves around the dyadic relationship between trapper Joe Bass and the slave Joseph Lee; their hopes and their prejudices. Bass desires only to reacquire his pelts and Lee desires only to escape to Mexico. Both are reluctant to help the other. Each holds the other in contempt: Bass views Lee as a meek slave, and Lee views Bass as an uneducated hick. But, in the final scene, both characters are covered in mud; the color of their skin obscured. It is in this scene they find their equality, and one grasps the subtly of the film's psychology.
★★★ Read More Reviews ★★★
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