A Man Called Horse

Sometime in the mid-to-late 70s a ten-year-old Hopper sat with his younger brother and his father and watched the Richard Harris western A Man Called Horse.  If you have viewed the movie, you know the one scene that it is famous for.  If you haven’t seen it, well, stick around, I’ll get to it in a few paragraphs.

My father, God rest his soul, lacked the ability to bring a sense of appropriateness to the viewing of movies with his children.  Very much like Howard Stern’s father taking young Howard to see Barbarella in the theaters.  Similarly, my dad’s appropriateness problem also applied to movies with high sexual content, as well as movies with high violent content.  In the early 80s, for instance, my father took me and my younger brother, both of us barely teens, to see Hotdog: The Movie and Al Pacino’s Scarface.

None of this was helped by the fact that in the mid-70s our neighborhood was invaded by Cable TV.  I wrote about that a bit, here (in a reference to another shocking 70s movie, to a ten-year-old).

A Man Called Horse is a fairly decent enough Western aimed at a more mature crowd than ten-year-old Hopper.  It’s thoroughly a product of its time – 1970, I believe it was made – so it flirts with anti-Western themes and psychedelia.  Which is not to say it’s a bad movie, it’s not; it just ain’t a John Wayne type of flick.

Richard Harris, an actor I loved since watching him in Orca, seen by me and a whole bunch of my fourth-grade friends around the same time as I saw Horse, plays a refined and somewhat snobby Englishman John Morgan off on a hunting jaunt in 1835 frontier America.  Five minutes into the film Injuns ambush and kill his guides while the obtuse Englishman bathes naked in the river.  Suddenly ropes lasso round his neck and he’s dragged helpless as a babe from the water, captive of a Sioux war party.  Ignorant of the Indian language, he’s made out to be no more than a beast, a horse, dragged into his captors village to live the life of a subhuman captive.

We follow Morgan through several failed escape attempts.  Though beaten, he does not resign himself to the fate Sioux captivity has in store for him.  With the aid of a long-term prisoner, a slightly insane French trapper, our hero regains his dignity, learns the ways and the morality of the tribe, wins its respect, gains a wife, and, ultimately, becomes its chief (sorta).

Two-thirds through the movie is The Scene.  The Scene that permanently etched a groove in my brain, an image that freaked out me and my brother as children, though it now seems somewhat tame by mature Me.  In order to prove his worthiness of an Indian mate, Morgan must undergo a test of courage.  In a tent filled with the elders, a medicine man takes what looks like eagle talons and carves up the English Indian’s chest.  Then, sharp bones and inserted horizontally into his pecs.  Ropes are lowered down, fastened on these bones, and Richard Harris, in all his prosthetic-chest glory, is raised ten feet off the ground, spun around, and has a sixty-second acid trip.

Whoa.

That felt good, writing to get that out of my system.

 Ouch … that’s gotta hurt …

Anyway, back to the subject of appropriateness and movies.  Against my wife’s judgment, I decided to watch A Man Called Horse with Little One yesterday afternoon.  As frequent readers here know, I enjoy a special bond with my oldest where we watch movies of all stripes together.  (N.B. This special bond has to wait for Patch until she outgrows her fear of the dark.)  I let Little One know I watched this movie with my dad when I was her age, and I let her know there is a pretty gross scene in it that I never forgot.  Well, once I mentioned those two things she had to watch the movie with me in its entirety.  When the courage ritual came on screen, she really wasn’t as wide-eyed as I was at her age.   Is it because of cultural desensitization, cultural coarseness?  Or is she just made of heartier stock than me?  I guess I’ll never know (though I think both explanations are possible in equal measure).  But I’ll tell you one thing: we had a great afternoon watching a movie together.