Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. 1969. USA. Written and directed by Abraham Polonsky. Based on the book Willie Boy: A Desert Manhunt by Harry Lawton. With Robert Redford, Robert Blake, Katharine Ross, Susan Clark, Barry Sullivan, Charles McGraw. 35mm. 95 min.
Abraham Polonsky’s first film after 20 years on the Hollywood blacklist—his 1948 Force of Evil had been his only directorial credit up to this point—arrived in 1969 as a Western built on a true 1909 manhunt, but with politics close enough to the surface that the allegory is impossible to miss. A Chemehuevi-Paiute man named Willie Boy (Robert Blake) kills his girlfriend’s father in what tribal custom and his own account call self-defense, then flees with Lola (Katharine Ross) into the Mojave. Deputy Sheriff Cooper (Robert Redford) leads the posse. Conrad Hall’s photography—dusky, naturalistic, shaped by the refusal of easy spectacle—gives the desert the quality of a place where resolution will not come easily or clearly.
Polonsky’s unwillingness to distribute sympathy cleanly makes the film more interesting than a simple political fable. Willie Boy is not accommodating, and Cooper is sympathetic but complicit in a machinery he cannot stop. Paul Schrader, reviewing the film, called it the work of a director displaced in time, style, and theme—and meant it ambivalently—but the description suits a film that belongs fully neither to the classical Western it superficially resembles nor to the revisionism gaining ground around it. The film was shot before Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and released after it, which framed Redford’s performance against his immediate breakthrough in a way neither film quite intended.