Well, in the U.S., Thanksgiving is
nearly upon us; that yearly celebration of the harvest which stemmed
from a mid-16th century feast that found fifty pilgrims
and ninety American Indians (since altered to Native Americans)
coming together as one for the festive occasion. We're a little bit
festive here today ourselves as we mark the occasion by serving up
some of those remarkably ridiculous “White actor as Indian”
casting decisions that were a movie staple for decades. (Please note:
We're not endorsing this practice, nor intentionally diminishing the
effect of it on actual Native Americans. We're just using it as a
hook to present some vintage photos of famous stars in action – and
if you've come here for rigid political correctness, you've probably
taken a wrong turn in the first place!)
Our cover girl, Cher, could rightfully
adopt the look she sports in this photo thanks to the fact that she
did have some Cherokee blood in her, though in truth, it was
negligible, as she is half-Armenian with some Irish, English, French,
Dutch and German tossed in as well.
But what about La Streisand?! I think
you'd have to do some awfully creative family-tree root-digging to
come up with any trace of Native American in her genes.
Thanks to the sensational popularity of
westerns in the cinema (and, later, television), the entertainment
landscape was positively inundated with projects that called for
Indian characters. For the longest time, virtually every role was
filled by a Caucasian in dark makeup and wig. Here, blonde actor
Bruce Cabot (earlier the leading man in King Kong, 1933) is shown essaying the villainous part of "Magua" in 1936's
Last of the Mohicans.
The role of "Uncas," a heroic young
brave, in the same movie was portrayed by debonair actor Phillip
Reed, who enjoyed a three-decade-long career as a second lead and
supporting player.
Print-model-turned-romantic-leading-man Alan
Curtis (perhaps best known for High Sierra, 1941) went native for 1949's Apache Chief (and you thought The Super
Friends came up with that name when they introduced a hero who grew
to gargantuan height!)
Li'l Abner (1940) found silent screen
funny man Buster Keaton in the role of "Lonesome Polecat."
Almost a quarter of a century later, he
showed up in Pajama Party (1964), one of the Beach Party movies, as "Chief Rotten Eagle." Precious little had changed in the interim.
One of the plot contrivances of It Had
to Be You (1947) had Cornel Wilde dolling up in Indian drag opposite
leading lady Ginger Rogers.
The 1950s were really a time when a
certain type of casting exploded. Many men with dark hair or a
scintilla of ethnicity other than Caucasian (hello there, Anthony
Quinn) already knew what it was like to be shoehorned into Indian
roles in various cowboy flicks, but now the genre was taking off to
an extent to where light-haired and blue-eyed men (and women!) were
being painted up for a turn in moccasins. I'd be lying if I said I didn't find the dark tan makeup and crystal blue eye combination strangely appealing, visually, wrong or not.
1950 marked the first time Jeff
Chandler essayed the role of Cochise in Broken Arrow. The role netted
him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor (which went to
George Sanders in All About Eve) and led to two further appearances
playing the part.
Later, a TV show of Broken Arrow ran
from 1956-1958 and starred Michael Ansara as Cochise. 6'2” Syrian
actor Ansara played countless Indian roles in movies and on TV from
the early-1950s onward.
Mexican heartthrob Ricardo Montalban was another man who was cast as any number of ethnicities including Native American. He costarred with Clark Gable in 1951's Across the Wide Missouri as a character called "Ironshirt," though we can't deny we prefer him with no shirt at all and think you will, too!
In the early days of his long, prolific
career, Charlton Heston starred in The Savage (1952), though in this
instance he was portraying a white man who'd been held captive and
raised by the Sioux (and renamed "War Bonnet.")
In 1952's Laramie Mountains, one of the
last of many in The Durango Kid series of low-budget westerns which
featured Charles Starrett, future-Tarzan Jock Mahoney popped up as a
brave named "Swift Eagle" (looking none too authentic in the process.)
Hiawatha (1952) starred a very hunky
Vince Edwards in the title role.
I can't say that the fabled story of
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's heroic brave has ever stirred much
interest in me, but a bare-chested, well-built Edwards certainly
does!
Blue-eyed John Hodiak (perhaps
best-known for 1944's Lifeboat) starred in Conquest of Cochise (1953)
as the famous Apache leader.
Costar of Conquest as a cavalryman was
Robert Stack who, that very same year, did the same again in War
Paint, this time with Keith Larsen done up as an Indian brave.
Larsen, by the way, had already gone
native in Hiawatha (1952) and would again in Chief Crazy Horse
(1955), Apache Warrior (1957) and in his very own TV series, Brave
Eagle (1955-1956), as the publicity photos below demonstrate.
The famous tale of Captain John Smith
and Pocahontas was told in 1953 with Anthony Dexter as Smith (seen
here in Indian headdress, however, with Alan Hale, Jr of Gilligan's
Island in the middle) and pert Jody Lawrence (seen below) as the
legendary princess.
Rock Hudson played Taza, Son of Cochise
(1954) in bronze makeup.
Considering the abbreviated costume
he's wearing here (and the fact that masterful director Douglas Sirk
was at the helm), I may have to check this one out sometime!
Hudson's costar was the lovely Barbara Rush, seen here in some publicity stills exploring her Indian side.
Wisconsin-born Broadway actor Eduard
Franz made a habit of playing various chiefs in movies such as Broken
Lance (1954), White Feather (1955) and The Indian Fighter (1955.)
The 20th Century Fox film
White Feather also had Hugh O'Brian, Jeffrey Hunter and Debra Paget
in Native American roles opposite “white man” lead Robert Wagner.
At least they put dark brown contact
lenses over the eyes of Hunter and Paget (who'd been cast as a native
in Broken Arrow, 1950, and would be again in The Last Hunt, 1956),
though they possessed some of the most beautiful blue eyes in the
cinema.
Here, in a publicity photo without the
contacts, you can see how much more striking, though physically
inaccurate, Hunter looked with his own eyes.
The same year found Hunter cast as a
Mexican aborigine in Seven Cities of Gold (1955), again with his eyes
darkened.
On the subject of blue-eyed Indians,
one need look no further than 1954's Apache, which starred Burt
Lancaster as one of Geronimo's warriors.
From the looks of this publicity
portrait of Lancaster with Jean Peters, things seem to have headed
backwards instead of progressing forward in the depiction of the
Indian on screen.
A term paper could probably be written
regarding the portrayal of not only race, but gender, too, in this
shot!
1955 found burly, dark Victor Mature in
the title role of Chief Crazy Horse.
Along for the ride in that one was
hunky Ray Danton in the part of “Little Big Man.”
(As late as 1975, Danton was still
being cast in native roles, such as this one, the title role of
Yellow Shirt.)
1955 was also the year that then-recent
Oscar-winner Donna Reed portrayed Sacajawea in the Lewis & Clark
film The Far Horizons, starring Fred MacMurray and Charlton Heston as
the famous explorers.
Would you buy blonde leading man Scott
Brady as a Navajo, educated by the white man? 1955's The Vanishing
American expected us to do just that.
The 1956 western Mohawk (which lifted a
fair amount of stock footage from the 1939 John Ford classic Drums
Along the Mohawk) featured a plethora of Caucasian actors in Indian
costume and makeup. Mae Clarke was famous for taking a grapefruit to
the face from James Cagney in 1931's The Public Enemy, but no one
dared to do so here, lest her “red-skin” makeup be wiped off!
Gravel-voiced Neville Brand was a
veteran of countless westerns, though more often he played a cowboy
or cavalryman.
Several viewers pointed out the
absurdity of “malt shop teen” Tommy Cook (below) as a feisty brave in
Mohawk (and he certainly isn't very authentic, particularly when it comes to his voice!), but this was but one
of many Indian roles he'd done since he was a preteen, with names
like "Little Beaver," "Chito," "Little Elk" and so on.
For me, the real lunacy was Rita Gam
(seen here with star Scott Brady) as a Mohawk princess. Her bright
blue eyes seared the screen.
Not only did she sport full-on,
Hollywood glamour makeup, but they even gave her a buckskin pantsuit
to wear part of the time.
The whole thing was surprisingly
risque, however, as she wound up in a skimpy, low-cut, buckskin,
sopping-wet mini-dress! This get-up looks something like what Disney's
Pocahontas wound up in for their 1995 animated feature.
One of my favorite on-screen Indians,
period, was blue-eyed Caucasian Henry Brandon as the imposing Scar in
The Searchers (1956.) Somehow a tribute to this movie has eluded this
site for five years even though the movie is a top ten favorite of
mine. One of these days...
Blonde, blue-eyed, former Tarzan Lex
Barker played an Apache chief in 1957 flick War Drums.
Tall, dark John Russell (of Lawman,
1958-1962) portrayed a Sioux chief in Yellowstone Kelly (1959)
opposite towering Clint Walker.
Yet another example of a brilliantly
blue-eyed actor playing an Apache came with 1962's Geronimo, starring
Chuck Connors in the title role! Connors seemed to be squinting as
much as humanly possible throughout the movie in order to diffuse his
eye color.
Connors' real-life wife Kamala Devi
played his wife in the film. (Hailing from Bombay, India, this was a
case of an Indian playing an “Indian!”)
She was breathtakingly lovely in this
and other movie and TV projects, though her makeup in Geronimo is, as
was par for the time, Hollywood-polished.
Musical star Howard Keel sought refuge
in westerns once his genre and style fell out of favor, thus he found
himself in The War Wagon (1967) as a half-Jewish/half-Indian ally to John Wayne and Kirk
Douglas named "Levi Walking Bear!"
1969's Tell Them Willie Boy is Here
starred Robert Blake and Katharine Ross as Native American fugitives,
though with her (unusually short) hair in her face throughout the
entire movie, it might be hard to spot Ross!
She had played an Indian role earlier
in her career, too, as this photo depicts, though I wasn't able to
nail down which project it was.
As the '70s dawned, things were not
particularly becoming more reverent or appropriate when it came to
Native American portrayals. One of the all-time tackiest had to be
1970's Dirty Dingus McGee, which starred Frank Sinatra and had
baby-voiced, blue-eyed actress Michele Carey trotting around in a
tarty little get-up cut to THERE.
Then there's blue-eyed Brit Oliver Reed
as a drunken, horny Indian in The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday
(1976), hamming it up as if his life depended on it!
For decades, TV shows had turned to
Indian clothing and headdress for laughs. Here, the gang from F-Troop
(Forrest Tucker, Larry Storch and Ken Berry) are in questionable
disguise.
Paul Fix, an actor of German heritage
and veteran of countless westerns, is shown here in a 1969 episode of
Here's Lucy called “Lucy and the Indian Chief.” He'd portrayed
Cochise (who hadn't?!) on a couple of episodes of The High Chaparral
in 1967 and 1968. (He later turned up in the aforementioned Dirty
Dingus McGee as “Crazy Blanket” and in the 1971 Dean Martin
western Something Big as “Yellow Sun,” among other similar
credits.)
This comparison shot of curvaceous
starlet Lisa Seagram shows her contemporary appearance next to her
dressed as a maiden for a 1963 episode of Wagon Train. This was
something done over and over on 1950s and '60s television.
Advertising was another area in which
non-Indian performers dressed up for comic effect to speak “Pigeon
English” as they sold product. Here we see Jonathan Winters
plugging General Motors campers with air-conditioning.
During his long-running variety show (1965-1974), Dean Martin donned a ceremonial headdress while his resident Golddiggers were decked out in skimpy maiden costumes.
Finally, as the late-1980s and 1990s
rolled around, more effort was exerted to see that actual Native
Americans wound up portraying the appropriate roles in movies. Dances
with Wolves (1990) and Last of the Mohicans (1992) spring to mind as
two movies which benefited greatly from employing racially-correct
actors in key roles. Hackles were raised a bit, however, in 2013 when
Johnny Depp chose the iconic role of Tonto with which to continue his
parade of colorful roles in The Lone Ranger.
Before we pick up stakes and depart
this post, I leave you with, not a Caucasian cast as an Indian, but
one of the screen's most delicious specimens dressed as one for part
of his character's job at Cypress Gardens. The movie is Easy to Love
(1953) and the star, John Bromfield, is, too!
He put on a headdress as part of the
pageantry of the Florida attraction in this Esther Williams swimming
spectacle. Later, still in his buckskin pants, he goes nose-to-nose
with Van Johnson over their mutual attraction to her. (Meanwhile,
she's off dating Tony Martin!)
As they both realize that Williams has
been on the town and elsewhere with Martin, Johnson seems unable to
resist grabbing Bromfield by the arm and we certainly cannot blame
him! If you happen to be in a place that celebrates Thanksgiving, I
hope it's a happy one! I'll be back soon with more...