15

A MAN CALLED HORSE [1970]

It might have occurred to Harris to take a break after the rigours of playing such a demanding role as Cromwell and the hair-raising experience that he would always recall when talking about it, but he went straight on to another film with a most unusual story and a part that was challenging, not least in a physical sense. In December 1969 he flew to Mexico and the location for A Man Called Horse.

It was the third story adapted for the screen from the writings of Dorothy M. Johnson. She was born in 1905 in McGregor, Clinton County, Iowa, and in high school worked as a stringer for a newspaper in Montana. In the 1930s she sold a magazine article to the Saturday Evening Post for what was a princely sum at the time – $400 – which was some indication of her talent. After the Second World War, which interrupted her writing career, she produced some of the best western stories of the time.

Between 1956 and 1960 she taught creative writing at the University of Montana, from which she also graduated, and wrote numerous articles and fictional stories for a variety of magazines. During the same period she had posts as secretary and researcher for the Montana Historical Society and secretary-manager of the Montana Press Association.

In 1957 she was awarded the prestigious Spur Award from Western Writers of America for a short story ‘Lost Sister’ from her collection titled The Hanging Tree. The story deals with the reintegration into white settler society of Cynthia Ann Power, who was kidnapped as a child by a Comanche Indian tribe. Two years later she was made an honorary member of the Blackfoot tribe.

The first of Johnson’s stories adapted for screen was The Hanging Tree, released in 1959, directed by Delmer Davies and starring Gary Cooper, George C. Scott (in his first film) and Karl Malden, set in the gold fields of Montana during the gold rush of the 1860s and 1870s.

The second was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, released four years later, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and James Stewart. The film is remembered (among other things) for the famous line: ‘When the truth becomes a legend, print the legend.’

But the premise for the next film was, as the saying goes, a horse of a different colour. It was from a collection of short stories published in 1968 and was only five pages long. But such was the skill of the author that her plain but dense prose gave a reading experience more akin to a novel. Entitled A Man Called Horse it had an existential quality, quite apart from an intriguing storyline that was redolent of those great masters of the art Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, albeit in a Wild West setting. It was not surprising that Richard Harris became interested and committed to the expression of the subject matter.

The opening paragraphs of the story would have been sufficient to hook him:

He was a young man of a good family, as the phrase went in the New England of a hundred odd years ago, and the reasons for his bitter discontent were unclear, even to himself. He grew up in the gracious old Boston home under his grandmother’s care, for his mother had died in giving him birth; and all his life he had known every comfort and privilege his father’s wealth could provide.

But still there was the discontent, which puzzled him, because he could not even define it. He wanted to live among his equals - people whom were no better than he and no worse either. That was as close as he could come to describing the source of his unhappiness in Boston and his restless desire to go somewhere else.

The latter paragraph could be describing Harris to a T. Although this story was set in another country and another time, still its dramatic ebbs would, by dint of circumstance, pull him into the flow. It may have been ‘no country for old men’ in W.B. Yeats’s phrase, but it would prove perfect for the Irish actor.

In Johnson’s story the man from Boston with no name left home in 1845 and went to seek his identity and equality in Indian country, where danger would sharpen and perhaps prove the efficacy of his instinct. He hired companions but they were killed and he ended up a captive of the Crow tribe of Indians. It is there that the real tale and examination of his pursuit begins, and when he acquires the name, self-given and accepted by the tribe, of Horse.

He begins the period of captivity, practically naked, lapping rainwater from the ground. Thrown a chunk of meat by an old woman, he has to fight the dogs for his share of it. He realises that he has to bury his pride and restrain his emotion if he is to survive. The captive becomes a horse, ‘a docile bearer of burdens, careful and patient’. The old woman, Greasy Hand, lives in a tepee with her warrior son Yellow Robe and his wife, and his little sister Pretty Calf, with whom the man/horse’s fate becomes inextricably linked.

There follows a hideous chronicle of the privileged man’s submission to and acceptance by the Indian tribe, during which he has to murder members of another tribe in order to acquire status. He captures his victim’s horses and this dowry allows him to marry Pretty Calf whom he loves, and she him. She educates him in tribal customs. He prospers with the acquisition of more horses and achieves equality with his Indian peers.

It is a brilliant exposition of the merging of one culture with another and the subsuming of the educated white man into the primitive mores of a tribal community. By a quirk of good fortune, it becomes a rite of passage to share and attain the respect and status that had been given rather than earned in his previous life.

But tragedy, in the shape of the deaths of Yellow Robe and Pretty Calf in battle, reduces him to the depths that marked the beginning of his captivity. By recognising Greasy Hand after her entreaty as mother he must, according to custom, protect her until she dies. He does, and finally, three years later, returns to Boston. The last line of the story sums up the result of his extraordinary journey: ‘He did not find it necessary to either apologise or boast, because he was the equal of any man on earth.’

Producer Sandford Howard had read the story in an anthology of western stories and instantly recognised the potential for a movie. He bought the rights for a song and began to develop it. He hired veteran Jack De Witt to write the script, for which Johnson would get an agreed credit, and when it was completed went looking for a bankable actor to play the central role of the young English aristocrat John Morgan. He also got on board Elliot Silverstein, who had directed the 1965 production of Cat Ballou, which got four nominations and an Academy Award for Lee Marvin in the leading role.

But the choice of Silverstein was strange as he had an unremarkable career and Cat Ballou was a spoof on the western genre, a clever but light film. A Man Called Horse was a serious piece, unrelentingly brutal and potentially of controversial subject matter. Howard had put the wrong man in charge and this may have had some influence on the fact that a number of actors, including Robert Redford, passed on the project. Harris, however, never one to avoid a challenge, accepted the role.

Silverstein proved to be a disaster and fought with his leading man, who as usual was putting all his energy and talent into a part and a picture he believed in, and could see that the director just did not get the concept or the potential of the story. The director’s final cut outraged Harris, who was proved right in his attitude when a test screening produced a hugely negative reaction from the audience. With the help of a colleague at the production company, Howard re-edited the film until a version was produced that all were happy to release and which conformed to the original vision and spirit of Dorothy Johnson’s story.

This of course both added to the delay of the release and considerably increased the cost of the production, which the producer claimed was over $1 million. There might have been some exaggeration in this respect, but in the long term the effort would prove worthwhile as it would transpire that there would be two sequels (at admittedly long intervals) to the original production, not a bad result considering the difficulties involved.

The impact of the film when released in 1970 was immediate, with excellent reviews. An element of controversy surrounded the graphic initiation rite of Morgan being raised by hooks to his pectoral, and audiences were fascinated by the newness and authenticity of the depiction of a white man adapting to the ancient rituals of an Indian tribe. As Harris put it in an interview: ‘The public has never seen the American Indian as he was before the white man. In this movie, we see the truth.’

The sequels that would appear in 1976 and 1982 were much less engaging, had no surprise and could never match the impact of A Man Called Horse, a movie that would for many years to come be largely associated with Harris’s central and powerful part in it. The experience had also cemented a fruitful working relationship between Harris and the film’s producer.

Of course, without Johnson’s incredibly brief but mightily effective short story, there would have been no films. Even if no one could connect her name to either The Hanging Tree or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the Montana-based writer could have derived at least some financial satisfaction from her association with Hollywood.

While a relatively young woman Johnson had experienced a failed marriage and ever afterwards was proud of her own self-sufficiency, which would have been helped in later life by the translation of her stories to the silver screen. She died in 1984, two years after the last of the movies, The Triumphs of a Man Called Horse, was released. She wanted her epitaph to read ‘Paid in Full’. The headstone on her grave in a Montana cemetery simply reads ‘Paid’.