Revisionist westerns of the 1950s and beyond started to question the western mythos, casting an exploratory light on its assumptions about things like race and ethnicity, sexuality, and Manifest Destiny. This film, which features a great pedigree—John Huston in the director's chair, Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn in front of the camera and the great Franz Planer behind it—comes draped in the hair shirt of revisionism, but in reality it's an unrepentant throwback to the good old days when the only good Indian was a dead Indian. It has a modern twist, and it pretends to deal with racism, but it devolves rapidly.

The Zacharys are an all-American western family. The oldest son, Ben (Burt Lancaster), runs a small cattle empire with the help of his younger brothers Cash (an almost unrecognizable Audie Murphy) and Andy (Doug McClure). At home, their mother Mattilda (Lillian Gish) and their adopted sister Rachel (Audrey Hepburn) sew and cook and take care of the house. Their idyll is interrupted by the arrival of a creepy old man (Joseph Wiseman) who claims to know a secret about Rachel: she's actually a Kiowa Indian. He spreads the rumor, causing problems both with the local Kiowa, who have maintained an uneasy peace with the whites for several years but who now want their lost sister back, and with the whites, whose hatred of Indians leads them to reject Rachel and the rest of the Zachary family when the rumor turns out to be true. Ben leads his diminished family in a seemingly hopeless defense against the Kiowa, who lay siege to the Zachary house in an effort to kidnap Rachel.

At first, it seems like there might be a message here about intolerance. It comes close when the old man lets the secret out—Rachel is indeed a Kiowa—and the townspeople reject both her and the family, and even closer when her brother Cash flips out and rejects her. But the remainder of the film proceeds to stomp that hesitant grasping at enlightenment into the dust, underneath the hooves of several dozen Indian horses as they attack the Zachary household in an unreconstructed circle-the-wagons scene that wouldn't have been out of place in an early John Ford western. At this point, the film becomes something else, a treatise on the age-old nature versus nurture question: will Rachel's corrupt Indian blood win out, or will her white upbringing triumph and allow her to take part in that whitest of actions—killing Indians? The white people never miss, and the Indians seldom shoot; they're superstitious, losing several warriors in an all-out attack on the family piano; they conveniently ride around in circles past the waiting rifles.

Another bit of thematic oddness that I trace to the film's racism is the growing attraction between Rachel and Ben. At first it's playful teasing, then there are some meaningful glances, but the old incest taboo is working at full strength: even though the two of them aren't blood relatives, they've been raised as if they were. But after it turns out that Rachel is an Indian, things change. It's summed up in very weird shot: Cash, the prodigal son returned to the family, is standing side-by-side with Rachel, facing the camera, and Ben, standing between them and facing away from the camera, embraces them both, then turns to kiss Rachel. It's the reunion of the family with some disturbing incestuous overtones, but I think those were lost on the filmmakers. I think that had Rachel been white, she and Ben never would have—or could have—ended up together, but because she's an Indian, all bets are off. Her options become instantly limited to various classes of sexual degradation: the savagery of the Indians, life as a prostitute in Wichita, or pseudo-incest with her brother Ben.

Add to the conceptual flaws some agonizing performances. At his worst, Burt Lancaster could be an overbearing actor, a caricature of a man of action. He's near that here, but he doesn't seem so outsized because he's surrounded by overacting and grimacing. The bright spot among the performers is Lillian Gish, who, although she sometimes shares her costars' overexuberance, manages some moments of quiet grace. And then there's poor Audrey Hepburn, so horribly miscast. It's hard enough to accept her as a Native American, but it's impossible to believe that this character, so dainty and so uncomfortable saying "ain't" and "durn," could have grown up on the range. She's a London girl-school student in redface. (Note, however, the recent DVD box cover, in which they've made her hair blonde and lightened her skin. I'm baffled.)

Huston supposedly took on the film because he wanted to explore the story's treatment of racism, but he later distanced himself from it, unhappy about behind-the-scenes battles with the production company Lancaster (as in Burt)–Hill–Hecht (as in Ben) that led to constant script changes. It might not be his worst film—he later said it was the only film he directed that he disliked—but it's the worst of his films that I've seen. The film is based on a novel by Alan Le May, who wrote the novel that became John Ford's 1956 film The Searchers, and the difference is staggering. Despite its racist portrayal of the Native Americans, the earlier film saw the actions of its "hero," Ethan Edwards, as monstrous; however haltingly, it held up the values of the western genre and found them reprehensible. This film makes baby steps toward that, but then it erases whatever progress it's made. Coming four years after The Searchers, there's really no excuse for this film to play out the way it does.

—March 27, 2006