In the trivia section it says that the director John Huston wanted to make a "serious statement on race relations", but that the direction of the movie was changed, yet he decided to hang on to the project because he needed money to complete a house and saw the movie as an opportunity to indulge his interests in pre-Columbian art.
In short, he sold out. And not only him, but also Burt Lancaster, who co-produced the film, and helped change the original screenplay by Delbert Mann and J. P. Miller which, we may guess, treated the Kiowas a little more like actual humans than mere gun fodder, in the interest of the film's financial viability.
For most of the movie, the movie does actually do as decent of a job as one could expect for 1960 in raising issues of racism. Never mind that, save for a single person (the brother of the female protagonist), the Kiowas are not depicted in any kind of individualized manner in order for us to be able to think of them as "persons", and that even that one person's characterization is cardboard-thin.
Even a racially progressive movie (for its time) like "To kill a Mockingbird", which came out two years later, suffers from this problem: any consideration of racism is strictly from white people's perspectives and the victims of said racism are never granted any agency in the movie for their own perspective. Thus, any condemnation of racism in these films at the meta level, to the extent that there is any, is set against a baseline of "white savior" racism.
But we can chalk this up to the social standards of the times, and indeed that is not why I think the movie is morally repugnant.
No, the reason is that while the movie is ambiguous on on the moral aspects of the racism depicted for most of its duration, it takes a definite stand at the very end in condoning it.
I don't mind moral ambiguity in movies: it forces you to think for yourself about the issues they raise, rather than spoon-feeding you the conclusion they might want you to draw. So, if the movie had stayed morally ambiguous to the very end, I would have had absolutely no problems with it.
But, to the disgrace of John Huston and Burt Lancaster, it does not stay ambiguous. The movie concludes with a final wide-angle shot of birds in the sky flying away towards the horizon, accompanied by happy if not triumphant music and leaving no alternative interpretation than that it is being sold to us as a happy ending. This immediately following a massacre of dozens of Kiowas, including an instance of fratricide. The massacre is committed by a family which was in the wrong from the start, and is itself initiated with an unprovoked murder by order of the protagonist. As if that was not enough, the order itself is then revealed at the very end to be at least partly due to quasi-incestuous feelings. The movie invites us to root for a family that responsible for a number of atrocities which happened due to almost no one else's fault but its own.
Not being able to compare the story in the film to its original screenplay, my guess is that the moral ambiguity in the main part of the film is a carryover from the original version of the screenplay, and the ending was changed in the interest of making the movie financially successful.
I know some people who would give the lowest possible rating for movies that they find morally repugnant, but I do not think that way.
The movie is well-made in all technical and artistic aspects, and I do not think its reprehensible moral stance should completely negate these. If, for instance, the movie had stayed morally ambiguous until the very end, I would have likely given it a 7, which indicates in my way of rating a good but not very good or excellent movie.
In short, he sold out. And not only him, but also Burt Lancaster, who co-produced the film, and helped change the original screenplay by Delbert Mann and J. P. Miller which, we may guess, treated the Kiowas a little more like actual humans than mere gun fodder, in the interest of the film's financial viability.
For most of the movie, the movie does actually do as decent of a job as one could expect for 1960 in raising issues of racism. Never mind that, save for a single person (the brother of the female protagonist), the Kiowas are not depicted in any kind of individualized manner in order for us to be able to think of them as "persons", and that even that one person's characterization is cardboard-thin.
Even a racially progressive movie (for its time) like "To kill a Mockingbird", which came out two years later, suffers from this problem: any consideration of racism is strictly from white people's perspectives and the victims of said racism are never granted any agency in the movie for their own perspective. Thus, any condemnation of racism in these films at the meta level, to the extent that there is any, is set against a baseline of "white savior" racism.
But we can chalk this up to the social standards of the times, and indeed that is not why I think the movie is morally repugnant.
No, the reason is that while the movie is ambiguous on on the moral aspects of the racism depicted for most of its duration, it takes a definite stand at the very end in condoning it.
I don't mind moral ambiguity in movies: it forces you to think for yourself about the issues they raise, rather than spoon-feeding you the conclusion they might want you to draw. So, if the movie had stayed morally ambiguous to the very end, I would have had absolutely no problems with it.
But, to the disgrace of John Huston and Burt Lancaster, it does not stay ambiguous. The movie concludes with a final wide-angle shot of birds in the sky flying away towards the horizon, accompanied by happy if not triumphant music and leaving no alternative interpretation than that it is being sold to us as a happy ending. This immediately following a massacre of dozens of Kiowas, including an instance of fratricide. The massacre is committed by a family which was in the wrong from the start, and is itself initiated with an unprovoked murder by order of the protagonist. As if that was not enough, the order itself is then revealed at the very end to be at least partly due to quasi-incestuous feelings. The movie invites us to root for a family that responsible for a number of atrocities which happened due to almost no one else's fault but its own.
Not being able to compare the story in the film to its original screenplay, my guess is that the moral ambiguity in the main part of the film is a carryover from the original version of the screenplay, and the ending was changed in the interest of making the movie financially successful.
I know some people who would give the lowest possible rating for movies that they find morally repugnant, but I do not think that way.
The movie is well-made in all technical and artistic aspects, and I do not think its reprehensible moral stance should completely negate these. If, for instance, the movie had stayed morally ambiguous until the very end, I would have likely given it a 7, which indicates in my way of rating a good but not very good or excellent movie.