Three more titles took their place among the 4xblu online store’s offerings today: David Lynch’s “The Straight Story,” the Monty Python sketch comedy film “And Now For Something Completely Different,” and Abraham Polonsky’s “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here.”
Abraham Polonsky’s career in Hollywood got off to an auspicious start, as his screenplay for Robert Rossen’s “Body and Soul” was nominated for an Oscar and his directorial debut, “Force of Evil,” is among the most highly regarded film noirs of the era. However, his promising career was derailed when Polonsky, a lifelong unrepentant Marxist, was blacklisted after going before HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) and refusing to name names. He would work in the shadows under pseudonyms for years, but would not receive credit for a script until 1968’s “Madigan” or helm another film until “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here,” 21 years after his directorial debut.
Based on a real-life incident that occurred in 1909, “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here” was the 2nd movie Robert Redford made in 1969 (the other being “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”) that took place in that moment at the turn of the 20th century when the Wild West and the dawn of the automotive era awkwardly co-existed. In the film, Robert Blake (coming off a star-making performance in “In Cold Blood”) is Willie Boy, a Paiute Indian who flees with his beloved Lola (played by Katharine Ross in some pretty egregious brownface) after killing her father in self-defense. Redford is Sheriff Cooper, the leader of the manhunt that sets out to capture them, whose relationship with Dr. Elizabeth Arnold [Susan Clark aka Emmanuel Lewis’s mom on “Webster”(!)] is at times parallelled with that of Willie and Lola.