Hombre

This was one of the first of a new breed of Westerns of the 1960s and 70s that challenged the negative portrayals of Native Americans perpetrated in many earlier films. Paul Newman plays a white man raised by the Apache and embittered by the mistreatment of his adoptive tribe. The film was created by the same team that made the Oscar-winning modern Western, Hud, four years earlier: director Martin
Ritt, screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., and cinematographer James Wong Howe, in addition to Newman. Adapted from a novel by Elmore Leonard, the plot owes a debt to John Ford’s classic Stagecoach, retooled with anti-Establishment bite. The extraordinary ensemble cast includes Oscar winners Fredric March and Martin Balsam, Oscar nominee Diane Cilento, Richard Boone, Barbara Rush, Cameron Mitchell, and newcomers Maggie Blye and Peter Lazer. As Roger Ebert wrote, “The performances are uniformly excellent.” The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther said, “Savor it for its fine ingredients…this is a first-rate cooking of a western recipe.”