Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here

1969
PG
1h 38m

IMDb RATING

6.3/10

3.4K

YOUR RATING

In 1909, when young Paiute Indian Willie Boy returns to his California reservation to be with Lola, whose father disapproves of him, a killing in self defense takes place, triggering a massive man hunt for Willie.

Play trailer2:51

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Drama Western

In 1909, when young Paiute Indian Willie Boy returns to his California reservation to be with Lola, whose father disapproves of him, a killing in self defense takes place, triggering a massi... Read allIn 1909, when young Paiute Indian Willie Boy returns to his California reservation to be with Lola, whose father disapproves of him, a killing in self defense takes place, triggering a massive man hunt for Willie.In 1909, when young Paiute Indian Willie Boy returns to his California reservation to be with Lola, whose father disapproves of him, a killing in self defense takes place, triggering a massive man hunt for Willie.

Director
- Abraham Polonsky
Writers
- Harry Lawton
- Abraham Polonsky
Stars

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

6.3/10

3.4K

YOUR RATING

Director
- Abraham Polonsky
Writers
- Harry Lawton
- Abraham Polonsky
Stars

See production info at IMDbPro

Won 2 BAFTA Awards
- 3 wins & 1 nomination total

User reviews40

Featured review

7/10

Another pair of star crossed lovers

After a couple of decades on the blacklist Abraham Polonsky returned to mainstream cinema with a Romeo&Juliet type story. The Mojave Desert don't look a lot like medieval Verona, Italy but the story is the same.

The title role of Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here is played by Robert Blake who is a Paiute Indian kid who by their tradition kidnaps the women of his intentions Katherine Ross to make her his bride. It's their way of courtship, but when Ross's dad objects he's accidentally shot and killed by Blake.

Ironically with a good lawyer Blake might have gotten off. But Paiute Indians usually don't get good lawyers and they don't take to confinement. Still this incident might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that the sitting president of the USA in 1909 one William Howard Taft was visiting the area. That brings in the national media and blows up the story.

Robert Redford plays the sheriff charged with bringing in Blake dead or alive. He never played quite the roughneck character he does in this film than in any other work I can recall. Susan Clark plays the doctor on the Paiute reservation who has her views routinely ignored as she's mansplained on a regular basis. She also has her needs fulfilled by Redford as both are the best of what's out there in their corner of the world.

It's Blake and Ross who really capture your attention. I'm sure that William Shakespeare would have seen so readily the parallels between his timeless classic and what Blake and Ross are all about.

bkoganbing
Dec 28, 2018
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Storyline

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Trivia
Abraham Polonsky said to a USC film class at the time that he purposely shot and edited the manhunt sequences with characters moving in all directions across the screen, rather than in the usual way wherein both runners and pursuers would move in the same direction across the shots (i.e., left to right) to enhance the impression of urgent suspense in a chase. Instead, Polonsky was looking for a different feel for the audience, of the characters wandering, feeling their way through the landscape. He implied he was willing to sacrifice some suspense to externalize the characters' confusion. He also said that for Katharine Ross' brief, artfully lit nude shot, he exposed the film correctly but then produced a high-contrast copy of the same film frames with deep blacks and transparent lights, then bi-packed both pieces of films together to rephotograph. The high-contrast overlay ensured that the shadows on Ross' body were black--so that the image could not reveal more in the shadows than it was supposed to.

Goofs
Many of the hats worn in the film are not the style worn during the early part of the 20th century. Some in fact, could only have been sewn using machines created in the 1950s, nearly half a century after the film's setting.