The early 1970s brought forth a number of violent exploitation features claiming new
insights into an American scene troubled by the War in Vietnam and political
polarization at home. Some of these pictures were wildly popular, especially in markets
far removed from the cultural centers of New York and Los Angeles. Phil Karlson's
pro-vigilante saga
Walking Tall concerns a Southern sheriff's battle against
local gangsters. Rural audiences loved the movie, as it blamed the South's problems on
city criminals and the federal government; only local boys like the church-going,
brutal hero could be trusted.
Tom Laughlin's wildly popular Billy Jack character is an equally exploitative concept.
An American Indian ex- Green Beret, Billy Jack battles motorcycle gangs and land barons
like a re-born Lone Ranger. Laughlin's ambition to become a film producer paid off in
1967 with the first Billy Jack film,
The Born Losers. A moderately competent
actor partial to imitating the mannerisms of Marlon Brando, Laughlin fought hard to
retain control of his work. He and his wife, writer/actor/producing partner Delores
Taylor used fabricated credits to make their films seem less like family
productions.
Image Entertainment's
The Complete Billy Jack Collection DVD set begins with
The Born Losers, an update of Marlon Brando's motorcycle gang classic
The
Wild One. A renegade biker club terrorizes a California beach city, beating up
innocent motorists and gang-raping foolish young girls. The devilish gang leader Danny
(Jeremy Slate) kidnaps and threatens co-ed heiress Vicky Barrington (Elizabeth James).
She escapes after witnessing the rape of two other young local girls, who are too
frightened to testify in court. Laconic horse trainer Billy Jack (Laughlin) enters the
fray to protect Vicky from more brutality.
A western with jeeps and motorcycles instead of horses, the crude but effective
The
Born Losers exploits its rape scenes while claiming outrage for the traumatized
victims. To the film's credit, the girls admit that they were indeed looking for kicks;
one teen intent on escaping parental control shouts that she liked being gang-raped.
Guest star Jane Russell overacts as a cocktail waitress (or prostitute?) tearfully
shielding her daughter. The girl practices striptease dancing in her spare time, eager
to follow her mother's example.
The townspeople and their sheriff are craven cowards easily intimidated by bikers with
comical names like Gangrene and Speechless. William Wellman Jr. is a biker called Child
and the popular Robert Tessier debuts as the formidable Cueball. The usual swastikas
and iron crosses are featured, although Danny wears rather silly-looking plastic
sunglasses.
The direction and acting are wildly uneven. Star Elizabeth James is quite natural in
some scenes but contributes her fair share of groan-inducing line readings. Repetitive
standoffs and hostage negotiations slow the story to a crawl. We're quite happy when
the amiably violent Billy Jack commences killing the bad guys, just to stop the endless
talk. At 113 minutes the film is at least a half-hour too long.
As "T.C. Frank", director Tom Laughlin gives himself plenty of adoring close-ups. His
camera blocking reveals a fondness for images borrowed from Sergio Leone (some in-depth
compositions) and Howard Hawks (the bikers' war-whoop). The editing is particularly
chaotic, as seen in a final escape scene. Vicky bolts from the biker's lair. Six or
seven long cuts later, when Vicki should already be halfway to town, she's still
exiting the house. The movie begins and ends with slow zooms to the setting sun,
perhaps foreshadowing Laughlin's later affectation with spiritual themes.
Released by American-International,
The Born Losers earned sleeper hit status.
Laughlin and Delores Taylor redoubled their efforts on 1971's
Billy Jack, which
became a major phenomenon. The noble loner hero has moved to Arizona to defend Indian
rights and liberal values against a rural county run as a racist fiefdom. Local big
shot Stuart Posner (Bert Freed) steals horses from Indian land to be sold for dog food,
and browbeats his son Bernard (David Roya) into criminal acts against the Freedom
School on the reservation. The federal school's curriculum consists of horse riding,
spiritual enlightenment, political songwriting and improv theater. One of the drama
teachers is played by Don Sturdy, a.k.a. popular actor-comic Howard Hesseman.
Troubled teen Barbara (Julie Webb) returns from Haight-Ashbury defiantly pregnant,
prompting a beating from her father, bigoted deputy Mike (red-haired Ken Tobey).
Freedom School director Jean Roberts (Delores Taylor) takes Barbara in, and the teen
soon warms to the pacifist communal atmosphere. Native American spirituality figures
heavily in the school's counterculture philosophy. Whiny folk songs and weak improv
comedy routines pad the film's running time out shamelessly.
The slow talking, fast kicking Billy Jack hovers over the school like a protective
Shane, forcibly ejecting Posner and his crooked deputies from Indian lands and
fighting back against town bullies taunting the Indian children. Laughlin's
well-choreographed Hapkido moves were considered a sensation in the film's one major
fight set piece;
Billy Jack preceded the 70s wave of martial arts epics. In his
broad brimmed black hat and bare feet, Billy Jack became an instant icon.
The plot mechanics soon boil down to more hostage-taking and ugly rape scenes. Billy
Jack retreats into noble posturing, mumbling about the spirit power he derives from a
ceremony in which he subjects himself to several rattlesnake bites. Second lead Delores
Taylor is particularly weak in scenes that require her to cry over the threat to "the
children". She suffers a rape in silence, so Billy Jack won't run wild to avenge her.
The movie adds up as a particularly flaky stacked deck of hippie philosophy, Native
American Pride and bitter distrust of governmental institutions.
Billy Jack followed a crooked path to success. Abandoned by two studios during
production and denied satisfactory distribution by Warners, Tom Laughlin successfully
took back control of his film and reissued it in 1973. Instead of hiring a distributor
to contract with theater chains, the Laughlins took their show directly to theaters,
renting facilities for a flat fee and handling ticket sales on their own. The
much-publicized technique came to be known as "four-walling".
Billy Jack broke
independent box office records everywhere. Taking control of the "first coin" directly
from the box office yielded a far higher return for the filmmakers, and gave credence
to the notion that distributors and exhibitors routinely cheated film
producers.
The finale of
Billy Jack saw our hero a Christ figure in chains, unjustly
charged with murder. 1974's
The Trial of Billy Jack is a wildly overwritten and
overwrought direct sequel. Stepping onto a cinematic soap box, Laughlin's confused
harangue wrings emotional clichés from twenty hot-button political topics yet
refuses to truly deal with any of them. Billy Jack and Jean continue their struggle
against the corrupt system. The movie wants to be sincere but comes off as ludicrous.
Some subplots, such as an abused, crippled child with a pet bunny, make us think we're
being kidded, as in the spoof
Airplane!.
The frankly irresponsible message is that the government is too corrupt to function and
must be resisted at all costs. Supposedly a liberal cry of outrage against right-wing
attacks on college campuses (Kent State is evoked several times),
The Trial of Billy
Jack is more likely to inspire political extremists on the right. The finale, a
massacre of innocent kids by mindless National Guardsmen and State Police, is compared
via flashback to a My Lai- like Vietnam atrocity. Infantryman Billy Jack refused to
participate, thus forming his identity as an anti-establishment rebel.
While Billy Jack serves four years in prison, Jean Taylor develops the Freedom School
into a self-governing Utopian commune. Freed from the presumed oppression of state
schools, Jean's self-taught students make breakthroughs in the rehabilitation of abused
children. They also "dig for the facts" to expose governmental corruption, especially
on the issue of Indian land management. The school spreads its findings via its own
television station, a gambit that provokes the wrath of powerful interests.
Once freed, Billy witnesses more injustices to his Native American tribe and expels a
camping party of fat cat politicians and their prostitutes illegally poaching Indian
game. The "liars and thieves" in Washington have been stealing large parcels of
reservation property. Billy goes on an elaborate spiritual quest for the next level of
enlightenment. He's forced to defend the Freedom School students from redneck
vigilantes, knowing that powerful interests are looking for an opportunity to have him
killed.
The Trial of Billy Jack benefits from Panavision and a score by Elmer Bernstein.
Key scenes are played out against the backdrop of Monument Valley, just for postcard
appeal. But in expanding his franchise Laughlin has lost all narrative sensibility. At
three hours the show lacks forward momentum and soon breaks down into a series of
position speeches and lectures. A narrator rattles off a laundry list of flaky buzzword
activities at the Freedom School: bio-feedback, anybody? We never learn how the
students ferret out secret political conspiracies in Washington; they simply report
their shocking findings as absolute proven fact.
The acting is worse than ever, with Delores Taylor spending at least half of her scenes
weeping with a runny nose. Daughter Teresa Laughlin (Kelly) offers more ear-grating
folk songs. Billy Jack is either off painting himself red to meditate or engaging in
irrelevant Hapkido fights against various redneck goons. Positively nothing happens
that's not preceded by a long speech, or three. Laughlin's staging of a Vietnam War
atrocity is offensive in too many ways to list, as is the inflammatory massacre of
scores of unarmed kids at the finish. The parallels with the notorious Waco, Texas
standoff twenty years later are disturbingly prophetic. The paranoid hysteria of
The
Trial of Billy Jack has since been co-opted by radicals at the other end of the
political spectrum.
1977's
Billy Jack Goes to Washington is a full-on remake of the 1939 Frank Capra
film. Taking up the Jimmy Stewart role of a gee-whiz junior congressman, Billy Jack
brings his kickboxing skills to the Beltway. Produced by Frank Capra Jr. but rewritten
by Laughlin and Taylor, the film adds a disturbingly cynical twist to the original: it
maintains that
all business in the Federal Government is done at the behest of
lobbyists for major corporations. They control not only our elected officials, but the
media and the intelligence agencies as well. The once all-wise Billy Jack has been
re-imagined as a naïve outsider, achingly reverent of Jefferson and Lincoln and
shocked to discover that our government is a complete fraud.
A senior Senator dies unexpectedly, and a crooked governor appoints the newly pardoned
Billy Jack to fill the vacant seat. As in the Capra original, Billy Jack only slowly
learns that he's the dupe of grafters pushing through a bill to build a nuclear plant.
When Billy objects, the full weight of Washington corruption comes down on his head,
with falsified charges accusing Billy of profiting from a land scheme. New sub-plots
portray Washington D.C. as a Sodom and Gomorrah of political corruption. An ambitious
lobbyist is murdered for trying to blackmail his way into a cushy White House job. The
paranoia meter hits the ceiling when black hoodlums threaten Billy's young associates:
they turn out to be F.B.I. or C.I.A. agents working for evil lobbyist power
brokers.
Production values are reasonably high, and with good actors assaying roles firmly
associated with the likes of Claude Rains and Jean Arthur, most of the dramatics are at
least competent. Sam Wanamaker, Pat O'Brien, E.G. Marshall and Lucie Arnaz are at least
watchable. Delores Taylor returns to contribute a weeping scene or two. The film never
received a general release and for video was cut by at least half an hour, minimizing
or eliminating familiar faces from the earlier films. Suzanne Somers appears in the
cast list but seems to have been dropped as well. The editorial cut-down must have
happened in 1979 after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, as Billy Jack's
filibuster speech has been amended with new dialogue referring to the partial meltdown.
The film reaches a high level of demagoguery when an uproar from the Senate gallery
interrupts government business. Billy Jack preaches that "the people" need to retake
control of their own Government, and it is presumed that all Real Americans support
him. It's also disturbing to see Billy Jack, formerly a monastic loner distrustful of
all social interaction outside of tribal matters, now quoting Jefferson and imbued with
a righteous spirit of democracy. When it comes time to replay the original film's
filibuster scene, Tom Laughlin drops some of his Brando mannerisms in favor of the
halting speech patterns of Jimmy Stewart and does reasonably well.
"One Tin
Soldier" plays again over the end credits, but the franchise's emotional call for
revolution is as irrational as ever.
Image's four-disc DVD set of
The Complete Billy Jack Collection uses good
enhanced transfers with a decent level of encoding.
Born Losers (incorrectly
dated 1969) looks far better than old A.I.P. television prints. All of the films come
with two sets of audio commentaries, a 2001 track with Delores Taylor and Tom Laughlin
and a newer one that adds son Frank Laughlin to the mix. I audited the tracks only
briefly; near the end of
Billy Jack Goes to Washington Tom Laughlin expresses
his belief that American democracy is irreparably broken. Although Laughlin's ambitions
were to make the Billy Jack character a political symbol, most of his fans were more
interested in the escapist action thrills of his first two features, and deserted the
franchise when it took itself too seriously.
For more information about
The Complete Billy Jack Collection, visit
Image Entertainment. To order
The
Complete Billy Jack Collection, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Glenn Erickson
