One Little Indian (1973)

Director: Bernard McEveety
Writer: Harry Spalding
Stars: James Garner, Vera Miles, Pat Hingle, Morgan Woodward, John Doucette and Clay O'Brien

Index: The First Thirty.

This was Jodie Foster’s fifth movie, her third for Disney and her third under the direction of a McEveety brother. Surely they recognised a nascent potential in her, but unfortunately the elevation of opportunity she found in Napoleon and Samantha is not echoed here. Then again, it simply isn’t a film about women.

In fact, the only women we see in the initial forty minutes are Cheyenne refugees brought into a U.S. army fort as a stop on the way to a new reservation. Not one of them speaks, even Blue Feather, the “mother” of the titular little Indian. I use quotes because, after she prompts him to run and the soldiers catch him, they’re shocked to quickly discover that he’s white.

He makes it out at a second attempt and off he goes on his own into the Utah desert. Now, as we’ve already seen, there’s someone else on his own in the Utah desert and that’s Corporal Clint Keyes, trying to stay one step ahead of a patrol who want to take him back to a fort to hang him for mutiny and desertion. Needless to say, the two soon team up.

Well, they’re the two human characters but it’s a party of four, if we include the couple of camels that Keyes managed to escape with this time out. They’re mother and child, Rosie for Rosebud and Thirsty, because he or she always is. And, quite frankly, while we’re supposed to warm to the growing relationship between the soldier and the boy, the relationship between the soldier and his camel is far more engaging.

I don’t know if James Garner struggled with that camel for real, but both of them play it up to perfection regardless. “You’re not lovable,” he tells Rosie, “and you’re not ridable. Maybe you’re eatable.”

Of course, Garner is Cpl. Keyes, who appears to be a good guy even though he’s avoiding an execution. Fifty minutes in, he’s talking to the sole adult female with a speaking role when he says, “What I did I’m not exactly proud of, but I’m not ashamed of it either.” We aren’t let in on that secret until almost the end of the film, right before he’s facing the noose.

All we know is that he’s on the run and Sgt. Raines, played by Morgan Woodward, is tough and persistent on his tail. Raines has the help of Jimmy Wolf, an Indian tracker played by Jay Silverheels, over a decade and a half since the end of The Lone Ranger. It’s very subtle, but he’s given a crucial moment in this film.

Clay O’Brien is the young actor tasked with keeping up with Garner and Rosie the camel. I believe he was twelve when this was shot, but he was already a name, having debuted a year earlier in The Cowboys, impressing John Wayne with his cowboy skills. He’d retire in 1976 and return to the rodeo circuit where he became a seven time team roping world champion with Jake Barnes and a Pro Rodeo Hall of Famer.

As an Arizona resident, I’ll note that he was born here, in a town called Ray that was being turned into a ghost town around the time that he was being born, eaten up by a copper mine that prompted the evacuation of everybody to a new planned town called Kearny.

We don’t know his character’s name, as he’s unlikely to know it either. He was likely taken in by the Cheyenne at a very young age, given a new name that we’re never told and then baptised Mark at the fort, so that’s all we have. However, he can speak English and Cheyenne and is able to survive at least somewhat on his own in the desert. He grows on us as he goes, just as he grows on Keyes.

There really isn’t much of a story, because it all plays out episodically without any real goal in mind. Keyes aims to cross over into Mexico where the U.S. Army has no jurisdiction, but it never happens. Mark wants to get back to Blue Feather, the only mother he remembers, but it doesn’t happen either. Frankly, that’s OK. This was always about character and relationships.

And, if Keyes and Mark are going to end up as part of a family unit, it would really help if a convenient widow and daughter of similar age would arrive out of the blue and, hey, guess at what happens next?

The widow is Doris McIver and her daughter is Martha. They’re Vera Miles and Jodie Foster respectively. Does that suggest that they must be related to the McIvers much further east in Menace on the Mountain or was that just a go to name in Disney movies set during this period? The writers are certainly different.

Miles is as enticing in a wholesome way as a widow gets in this sort of movie and Foster is a precocious kid with good expressions. The one when she spies Thirsty outside is pristine, the sort of expression that makes her recognisable even at the age of ten. After a few blah lines in Tom Sawyer, she’s back to top form to show us why Disney and the McEveetys kept on hiring her, even if the size of her roles wasn’t always impressive. As with Menace on the Mountain and Napoleon and Samantha, she does her job well.

As a Disney movie, we know there has to be a happy ending and it’s the same one that we can see coming a mile away, in every detail. If I was surprised by it at all, it’s that it didn’t get an epilogue shot of two halves of the potential new nuclear family meeting up on the road to a happy life in Mountain Creek, Colorado.

I guess Harry Spalding’s script does what it needs to do and McEveety’s direction likewise, but neither particularly impressed me. This is a workmanlike film with the moralistic Disney veneer all over it. Where it shone for me most was in the character acting.

Arguably, I’d include Garner in that, because he plays Keyes like a character actor even if he happens to be the lead. However, Miles is good too, even if she’s hardly the female lead with a mere twenty minutes of screen time.

Behind them, though, are veteran character actors Pat Hingle, Bruce Glover, Andrew Prine, John Doucette, Morgan Woodward and, in one brief almost slapstick scene, Jim Davis, later to become famous as Jack Ewing in Dallas. Add in Jay Silverheels, Jodie Foster and the scenery of Kanab, Utah, known as Little Hollywood for its frequent appearances as a location in westerns and, occasionally, other movies, and it’s worth the watch, even if not for the usual reasons.

Of course, I’m watching right now for Foster and, while this wouldn’t be her final children’s movie, with Bugsy Malone only five films away, it seems to end an era in her career trajectory. Next up are four adult movies, even if she was still a child in them, and after getting through those and Bugsy Malone, she was a leading lady.