Review of The Scalphunters

Angered by the theft of his winter's harvest of furs, trapper Joe Bass (Burt Lancaster), with erudite escaped slave Joseph Lee (Ossie Davis) in tow, tracks and harasses Jim Howie (Telly Savalas) and his a crew of brutal scalp-hunters through the desert. The film is an awkward mix of broad physical comedy complete with cartoonish 'tweetie' sounds when a person gets hit on the head, and harsh action, especially the early scenes of Howie's men gunning down and bloodily scalping a group of drunken Indians, which, other than establishing them as particularly vile villains, contributes little to the film beyond its lurid (and somewhat misleading) title. I'm not a fan of the western-comedy genre (especially those made in the 1960s) and didn't find 'Scalphunters' to be overly funny or entertaining. Davis manages to makes Joseph Lee more than just a paradoxical gimmick but Lancaster plays his Joe Bass as a 'character' rather than a person. The racial subtext, contrasting the genteel, articulate black slave to the coarse, uneducated white mountain-man was likely a genre disrupter in the sixties but isn't handled with much wit or subtlety. On the plus side, the desert cinematography is nice, there is some excellent horse-wrangling (notably the loco-weed scene) and Elmer Bernstein's score is pretty good (when not being used to punctuate sight gags).