Sydney Pollack isn’t a director I associate with westerns, when I think of Pollack I think of films like The Yakuza, Absence of Malice or Tootsie, films with a contemporary setting. Yet Pollack directed the excellent Jeremiah Johnson as well as this hugely enjoyable comedy western so it’s perhaps a shame he hasn’t made a few more oaters.
Most successful comedy westerns tend to spoof the genre, sending up the characters and situations that are familiar to genre fans. The Scalphunters is one of the few that manages to be funny without playing the whole thing for laughs. That it’s so funny is down to William Norton’s witty script and the fine playing of the leads, in particular Burt Lancaster and Ossie Davis.
It’s this Burt/Ossie double act that generates the bulk of the comedic moments, as the cantankerous trapper Joe Bass (Lancaster) and ex-slave/would-be-Indian Joseph Lee (Davis) are thrown together when Bass is forced into trading his hard earned pelts for the black man. The banter between the two is a delight with Lancaster getting more laughs in the first twenty minutes than he did in the whole of The Hallelujah Trail.
Once the pair are parted the laughs don’t dry up completely but the film does become more of a straight action western as Lancaster goes after Telly Savalas and his band of scalphunters (including Shelley Winters). He picks off the gang gorilla style, slowly witling their numbers down and Pollack delivers some fine action scenes. For a director who got his start in television and had only made the jump to the big screen a few years prior to this, he makes remarkably good use of the 2.35:1 aspect ratio.
The final showdown is a satisfying one, the film culminating with a memorable brawl between Lancaster and Davis. If fact there’s hardly a bum note in the whole film, we get laughs, action and even a little social commentary thrown in for good measure. You can’t really ask for much more than that.
