This is my second hand picked Movie for this Sunday! (Hombre).

Hombre is a good movie for the era in which it was made. I have no basis for this, but it is probably one of the first movies to sympathize with the Native American plight.  The ending was a little disappointing. Not because of the results, but I think the plan was a little shaky. What if the kid missed despite having a free shot? The Apaches are more crafty than that. Anyway, there were some thought provoking themes brought up and I think the movie was well made. Fredric March‘s doctor is a type of character who is now widely portrayed — the self preserving and easy to hate closet caitiff; and March played it very believingly. I love these old kind of laid back westerns.

Story: “Hombre” centers around John Russell (Paul Newman), a white man raised by Apaches. Through inheritance of a boarding house, he’s drawn out of the mountains, where he was living among the Indians — who are suffering from starvation and mistreatment — and finds himself among a decidedly different group of people, some directly responsible for the Indians’ plight, some not … but most indirectly so, perhaps according to Russell, who has grown cold and hard because of his disgust at how his people have been forced to live.

Just because the ingredients are familiar, however, doesn’t mean “Hombre” isn’t an absorbing, suspenseful film. Indeed, Hollywood seems at its best when it returns to its traditions, and nothing is more Hollywood than the big, socially significant Western. All directors do one to prove they haven’t sold out.

Newman plays a white man who was raised by Apaches and chooses to cast his lot with them. Because he inherits a boarding house, however, he goes into town and gets tangled up with a lot of people whose lives aren’t as simple as the one he led in the mountains.

Eventually they all set out in a stagecoach and are held up by bandits. Newman helps them survive pretty well until the bandits think up a good Moral Dilemma. The Indian agent’s cultured wife will die of thirst if Newman doesn’t hand over the money the Indian agent stole from the Apaches. Ah! Naturally, Newman falls for it. He ought to take a good course in ethics if he’s going to be in many more of these.