The Ethnic-Avenger Films, 1971–73: A Moment in the Decolonization of American Film

american film has a long history of supporting colonialism. For years, Hollywood paid tribute to the European empires in rousing adventure films, from The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) to Khartoum (1966), despite a tradition of American disdain for old-world colonialism (Louis 593–95; Newsom 48–53). American films also mythologized the country's own colonial exploits at home and abroad, in tales of heroic pioneers and Indian fighters on the frontier, of benevolent plantation owners, and of soldiers stationed from the Alamo to the Philippines. Such cinematic visions never disappeared, but more critical views of colonialism proliferated after 1945 as decolonization remade the map of the world. Although decolonization often denotes countries gaining independence, it can also have a far broader meaning, implying the remaking of race relations; the dismantling of the political, economic, and cultural domination of one people by another; and a rejection of colonial mentalities by both colonizer and colonized. And though often applied to overseas empires, the concept can illuminate change inside settler colonies such as the United States, where colonizers are not leaving but where colonized peoples such as the American Indians struggle for equality. If one can understand American decolonization better by tracing the evolution of films on that subject, then it bears asking specifically when, why, and how American filmmakers revised colonialist cinema. This article will examine one significant moment in that history, focusing on early 1970s revisions to a subgenre of the action film: the "revenger."¹

Revengers are best known among Westerns, though they transcend that genre. Typically, these melodramas hook viewers at the outset with villains' heinous crimes against innocents. A male action hero then pursues the perpetrators at length (with delayed gratification creating dramatic tension) before finally exacting righteous vengeance. In older Westerns, white men often pursued American Indians or Mexicans; in John Ford's The Searchers (1956), for example, a Comanche raid on white settlers and the abduction of two girls spurs the Indian-hating Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) into a relentless pursuit of the raiders. Yet because American films playing overseas might create negative perceptions of American society, eliciting racial hatred made this formula ill-suited to moments when Americans wished to seem racially tolerant, as during World War II and the Cold War. In the 1950s, as America's civil rights struggles intensified and as Washington sought the allegiance of new nations, Hollywood began to have white heroes avenge racists' crimes against people of color. In Last Train from Gun Hill (1959), for example, Matt Morgan (Kirk Douglas) pursues a white rapist who murdered his Indian wife. Despite making people of color victims instead of villains, such films retained colonialist assumptions by implying it was up to white men to protect or avenge them.

If such changes indicate the need for myths to evolve, the revenger's longevity also highlights certain continuities in American culture. As Richard Slotkin argues, the glorification of righteous violence is an enduring feature of American popular culture, and teaching violence has remained a function of genres such as Westerns, war films, and crime films. Over time, forms endured while content changed, and even if the ethnicity of heroes and villains adapted to new attitudes, the use of violence to defend or avenge the weak persisted. Although taking revenge violated Christian morality, Americans' belief in the right of self-defense neutralized many misgivings, and the prevailing doctrine of nuclear deterrence used threats of revenge for self-defense. Imaginary revenge may have been a guilty pleasure, but it proved a reliable box office formula. In the 1960s, a period marked by assassinations, riots, and wars, movie violence increased as well, notably in such films as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and The Wild Bunch (1969). In the years following the 1966 revision and 1968 demise of Hollywood's Production Code, filmmakers presented unprecedented levels of graphic brutality and gore (Prince 12–16). Although Sam Peckinpah may have intended to sicken viewers and wean them from their thirst for blood, it is hardly clear that audiences reacted as...