hombre

The silent, stoic western hero is part and parcel of the genre’s mythology. Which essentially just means a hard land breeds hard men. But most of the traditional western stories – popularized by John Ford and Howard Hawks - spent a great amount of effort attempting to civilize those men; teaching them table manners, dance steps and how to treat a lady. Whether the end result was successful or not, usually the subject was agreeable to learn.

In Hombre (1967) Paul Newman plays John Russell, a former Apache captive who returns to the dying tribe of his own free will, unable to stomach the hypocrisy of white society. Here is a man who had a chance to return to civilization and spat right in its face.

As the film begins, Russell has yet another chance to put himself on “the winning side” when his adopted white father dies and leaves an inheritance for him to collect in the town of Sweetmary. Spurning his chance to earn an easy living – and some romantic chemistry with Jessie (Diane Cilento) who runs the local boarding house that he now owns – Russell chooses to sell the property, putting Jessie out of a job and both of them on the last stagecoach out of town.

Also along for the ride are some bickering newlyweds, a snobby Indian agent and his equally snobby wife and a last minute wild card, Cicero Grimes (Richard Boone), who bullies his way into the cab for suspicious reasons. Reasons that are soon made clear when Grimes and his partners rob the stagecoach, targeting bags of cash the Indian agent embezzled off the reservation. When Russell disrupts the robbery, he must lead his group of travelers cross-country with Grimes and his compatriots in pursuit.

Based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, the author’s prose has rarely felt so at home on the screen. It’s not easy to deliver “tough guy” dialogue this convincingly, but Paul Newman makes six syllable sentences sound like Shakespeare while Boone gets the film’s best scene intimidating a traveling soldier out of his ticket. These are hard men, fictional characters that embody a pulp fiction fantasy built around infallible loners. But they can’t both come out on top.

Director Martin Ritt’s real accomplishment lies in the tangibility of this dead-end western world. Every character has baggage, every scene has meaning, and every conversation feels almost embarrassingly personal. Hombre, despite traveling in the same wheel ruts as Ford and Hawks, feels refreshingly modern in its take on civilization and how societies work, embodied by Jessie’s third act plea for a moral compromise (“We better starting dealing with each other out of need and forget merit, because none of us have too much of that.”).

Hombre doesn’t give us the kind of hero we want. It gives us the one we deserve.

Twilight Time’s 3000-copy limited edition Blu-ray is spot-on in every respect. Image quality is superb and extras include the usual isolated score track, original theatrical trailer and audio commentary with film historians Lee Pfeiffer and Paul Scrabo along with another set of excellent liner notes by Julie Kirgo.