Yo, gran cazador

This splicing of THE SEARCHERS is one of the weirdest films I've ever seen, filmed by a Briton in a strange, unfamiliar Mexico. It's often said that the best films about America are made by foreigners, who can approach the familiar with an outsider's eye. But this crackpot film is something else. Though set ostensibly in post-Civil War America, this isn't an America recognisable from myth, cinema, TV etc. The film has an air of timeless fable about it, while dealing specifically with Western mythology.

Director Harvey uses the title horse as a focus for interconnecting stories, all dealing with the traditional Western clash of the primitive and civilisation. The former seems to have the upper hand. The vast scrub and desert of the film's landscape is unbroken, ripe for allegories of the mind. The only brief sites of civilisation are a stagecoach of missionaries and landowners, and their hacienda, from both of which derive behaviour that is anything but civilised.

The basic story intercuts three stories. In one, an aimless deserter, Pike, having lost his trading partner, steals a miraculous horse, Eagle's Wing, so-called because of its grace and speed. In the second, an Indian, White Bull, owner of this horse, waylays a stagecoach, and kidnaps one of its female occupants. In the third, the Spanish men sent to find her ignore this quest in favour of a murderous, plundering spree.

Although a revisionist Western, the treatment of the Indian is problematic. Unlike Pike, his character is never explained, forever inscrutable, denied a voice, except for an excruciating snatch of song. When he's not a strange Other, he's a symbol, whose role isn't entirely worked out - at one point a savage brute, at another he epitomises nature and freedom.

But Pike notes at the beginning that the film will attend to the period of primitivism before civilisation. In many ways the film resembles 2001 - A SPACE ODYSSEY, especially its opening sequence. Part of the film's power lies in the connections made between the three disparate characters, forcing us to view the mythic struggles and quests in a different light. Indian culture and Catholicism is linked by superstition, ritual, greed and murder. Both Pike and White Bull are musical and alcoholic. White Bull is demonised by both Pike and the abductee as a 'bastard', unwittingly revealing the tactic of illegitimacy used by colonising whites who infantilised the natives, becoming themselves 'necessary' fathers.

Unlike a traditional Western, concerned with making history, civilisation, and progress, this film is a double detective story, interrogating the past, tracks, remains.

What gives this film its remarkable uniqueness, I think, is, despite Maltin's racism, its Britishness. The climactic stand-off is more like an Arthurian joust. The film itself bravely eschews dialogue for the most part, creating the kind of visual and aural tapestry Malick missed in THE THIN RED LINE, and something few Hollywood directors would have dared. The existential doubling and quest motifs are more European myth than American (resembling another British Harvey Keitel movie, THE DUELLISTS).

Most astonishing is the use of nature. Most Westerns use landscape as an awe-inspiring backdrop: there is little sense of actually living in the West. In many ways, EAGLE'S WING is like a Powell and Pressberger film, with nature a powerful, pantheistic character in its own right - alive, dangerous, hostile, beautiful. There is a sublime scene reminiscent of A CANTERBURY TALE, when jewellery left as a trap by White Bull in the trees is suddenly blown in the wind: there is a haunting, tingling, magical, thrilling effect more reminiscent of the Arabian Nights than a horse opera. Heartstopping.

8+ points for a take on a fresh and probably-kinda-maybe-perhaps-was look into back 'then'. American Indians quite probably stole more than killed (I doubt they were unusually bloodthirsty)...who really knows. Nice slower and somewhat uncommon pursuit... and the way things develop are not patterned which means it has a unique and lovely pace. I found this film to be most interesting. Thankfully not another mindless shoot em up. I thought this film would suck at first, but *wow* I wound up getting wrapped up and being entertained, this is why we have cinema... nice treasure... good job! I have hopes nobody dissects this film. When the entire movie unfolds I experienced many unique twists, impossible to determine what will be next. The characters are entirely human and have either honor or not... passion or not... forgiveness or not. Wound up loving the White Horse, the Indian, Sheen... even the damned desert was great. All good.

Released in 1979, "Eagle's Wing" is an English Western about a white trapper (Martin Sheen) circa 1830 who steals a white mustang named Eagle's Wing from a laconic Kiowa Native (Sam Waterston). The Native then pursues him to get his horse back. Harvey Keitel, Stéphane Audran and Caroline Langrishe are also on hand.

This is a unique, professionally-made Western. The tone is thoroughly realistic, Waterston is impressive as the Native, the women are good-looking and the Mexican locations are magnificent, albeit thoroughly desolate. Unfortunately, the story isn't very absorbing. But the film's interesting in some ways and certainly worthy of your Western collection.

The movie runs 111 minutes.

GRADE: C+

The other commenters have written interesting things, indeed. The start of the movie had a reference to it being set in 1830. That is not "post-Civil War". It is thirty years before it. The setting is even a decade and a half before the Mexican-American War, thus being prior to the U.S. conquering what is now the southwestern United States and seizing it from the Mexicans. Pike was not a "cowboy", but rather a fur trapper, and it was the Indians who stole their pack horses and gear who killed his partner, with an arrow. Pike did not murder his partner. The setting was all wrong. The primary fur sought by the trappers was beaver, used mainly for the fashionable top hats of the eastern United States and Europe. The Europeans had already exterminated the beaver in much of its range in Europe due to over-harvesting. Beavers do not live in a desert, nor do any other furbearing animals that were being sought.

The whole thing seems like a very beautiful film school exercise, the rehearsal for a real film, or the cuttings from another film, picked up off the floor and edited into a... well, not a cohesive film, but certainly something.

Story is hardly there, or nonsense, and at one point has a couple of threads that I guess come together, to no particular purpose. Other threads are dramatically brought up then entirely dropped just as they reach their zenith.

The whole film is really like that. The most beautiful, well-scored, emotionally-moving, and generally sensible part of the film is the last few seconds, and the scene that plays out under the credits. No, not being insulting to say "credits were the best because it's over." I mean, there's a scene there, and it was the one time the movie really worked.

Too bad it took the better part of 2 hours to get there.

Also: Sam Waterston as an Indian. Sigh.