Abraham Polonsky: Interviews

“A Pavane for an Early American”: Abraham Polonsky Discusses Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here

154 “A Pavane for an Early American”: Abraham Polonsky Discusses Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here Joseph McBride / 1980 / 2011 Previously unpublished essay and interview. Archived. Joseph McBride Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, 1980/2011. Printed by permission of the author. This 1980 discussion with Abraham Polonsky that I moderated with the audience of the Los Angeles International Film Exposition (Filmex) was actually my second extended discussion with Polonsky about Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, which I regard as one of the great American films. From its original release in 1969 to less than widespread acclaim in this country , I was an admirer of Polonsky’s radical, bleakly existentialist Western, only the second of three films he was able to direct in a career riven by the blacklist. When I moved to southern California in 1973, I spent a year living in Riverside, where I explored some of the locations where the “Willie Boy incident” had actually taken place. I sought out Polonsky at his home in Beverly Hills and found him among the handful of most brilliant people I met in the film industry (Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, and Billy Wilder were among his few intellectual peers in Hollywood), as well as a surprisingly droll and cheerful fellow considering his long period of internal exile and the often-bleak themes of his work. Abe pointed out that the film of his that he most resembled in person was Romance of a Horsethief (1971), an even more neglected work that defied its Czarist Russian setting to become his most joyous celebration of life. In 1975, I persuaded Abe to screen Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here with me at Universal for the first time since he had made it. We followed that screening with a long and fascinating talk about the film, which is based on a 1960 nonfiction novel, Willie Boy: A Desert Manhunt, by Harry Law- joseph mcbride / 1980 / 2011 155 ton, a predecessor of mine as a reporter for the Riverside Press-Enterprise. I mentioned to Abe that one reviewer thought Willie Boy was so carefully crafted and constructed that it looked as though he had been mulling it over throughout his two decades on the blacklist. Abe replied with a smile, “They just haven’t seen fancy dancing for a while.” The motif of dancing pervaded Polonsky’s vision for the film and its themes; the intricately rhythmic pacing of the chase (in effect, The Last Western Chase), portrayed by the writer-director as both somewhat absurd and profoundly symbolic, is a major part of the film’s meaning as a bitter elegy on the nation’s formative period of frontier genocide. Polonsky described Willie Boy to me as “a pavane for an early American.” The dictionary defines “pavane” (a word of Middle French and Italian derivation) as “a stately court dance by couples that was introduced from southern Europe into England in the sixteenth century.” That stately pacing alone made the film out of step with the frenetic “Easy Rider era” from which it shines as a rare beacon of intelligence, and Willie Boy’s uncompromisingly radical political viewpoint toward American history and its demolition of the Western genre were not calculated to make the film popular in its native land (France, with its tradition of existentialist cinema and antiAmericanism , has always been far more receptive to it; until recently if you want a DVD of the film, you had to order it from France). Five years after my first talk with Abe about the film, I had an opportunity to discuss it with him publicly when I offered to host a screening at Filmex (I have incorporated in this transcription some of the insights gleaned from the earlier discussion). Although the audience at a Century City theater in early 1980 was attentive to the film and polite to Polonsky , who fielded questions with acuity and his characteristic wry wit, one can sense in some of the questions a certain incomprehension toward the film’s most original elements. Some audience members seemed particularly thrown by its subtle and complex view of sexual relations as a lethal battleground (including Polonsky’s decision to make Susan Clark’s Indian agent a more conflicted figure than the actual historical character) and its depiction of Robert Blake’s Paiute Indian Willie Boy as fatalistically expressing his defiance of the genocidal white world through what we would now call “suicide-by-cop” in his fatal confrontation with Deputy Sheriff Cooper...