An independently made revenge western, The Winds of Autumn (1976) centers on an eleven-year-old Quaker boy, Joel Rigney, who sets out for vengeance against a band of outlaws who have wiped out his family. When a neighbor, Mr. Pepperdine, realizes where Joel has gone, he grabs his guns and sets out after the boy. Filmed in Montana, largely in Glacier National Park, in the fall of 1975, the cast is sprinkled with a few familiar names such as Jack Elam, Jeanette Nolan and Dub Taylor, but is mostly filled with unknowns. Director Charles B. Pierce’s son plays Joel, co-screenwriter Earl E. Smith plays Mr. Pepperdine, and the director himself even takes a small role.
Pierce had made his first feature, the pseudo-documentary horror film The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), in his home state of Arkansas for $160,000; it became an indie sensation and grossed an astounding $25 million, becoming the tenth highest grossing film of the year. Twenty-seven years later, it was also the primary influence on another documentary-style hit indie horror film: The Blair Witch Project (1999). Pierce went on to direct thirteen features as a regional filmmaker, working primarily in Arkansas, where he became a local institution. Though his pictures mostly did not draw much attention from national film critics, several became cult classics, and Pierce is now recognized as a pioneering, truly indie, maverick 1970s filmmaker. In 2008, two years before his death, the Arkansas Times deemed him “a state treasure [whose] spirit of determination separates real independence from the stale marketing category we call the independents.”
Pierce’s daughter Amanda Squitiero later said, “It’s amazing to me that he just always made things happen. He was so skilled at scraping together a way to do things... But he would laugh at himself because he couldn’t go out and do a gangster film or a standard love story. He always felt he would fall on his face, because he would only deal with subjects that touched him -- specifically, films where he felt he had something to say. He loved Westerns and he loved horror films, and everything he did was personal... If the budget required, he’d be the sound recordist, the gaffer, the grip, and an actor. He wanted as much artistic control as he could have, which is why he needed to be an independent.”
The Winds of Autumn was Pierce’s fourth film and second western. As with most of his pictures, it was released in regional, independent venues and drive-ins. Because there was no concerted national opening, the official release date is hard to pin down, although the AFI Catalogue of Feature Films lists February 20, 1976. The Toledo Blade reviewed the picture on June 14, 1976, calling it “a rather luridly violent tale of revenge, in which most of the principals meet a gory end... Earns an A for effort but, alas, at best a C- for execution... On the plus side is the photography, which takes full advantage of the breathtaking beauty of Montana’s high country... The interiors, too, have a lush lighting which drenches crude rooms with a sunny glow.”
According to writer Daniel Kremer, The Winds of Autumn was “a picture to which [Pierce] felt close” and featured “more than a few passing nods to Pierce’s favorite film, Shane (1953).” For Kremer, the poignant runaway horse sequence in Winds represents the “single sequence in [Pierce’s films] to function as an x-ray of his artistic soul. [It] best defines his unmistakable humanity... Here, Pierce’s aptitude for purely visual storytelling, composition and pacing, along with an acute sense of editorial syntax, augments what would have naturally been an effective and affecting sequence as written. Its heart and emotional resonance stems from a technical mastery.”
SOURCES:
AFI Catalogue of Feature Films, entry on The Winds of Autumn
Derek Jenkins, “Charles B. Pierce Retrospective,” Arkansas Times, May 15, 2008
Daniel Kremer, “The Art of the Possible: Charles B. Pierce’s Arkansas Cinema,” Filmmaker Magazine, April 17, 2017
The Toledo Blade, June 14, 1976
