Hombre

John Russell was born white but raised among Apaches and counts himself one of them. He sets out to sell an inherited boarding house and takes a stagecoach. The white passengers do not want to sit where he sits. Then the coach is robbed, and out in the dry country the only way to survive is what Russell knows. The subject is not the robbery but morality shifting the moment it is needed. The passengers exclude Russell, then ask for his help, and treat that help as an entitlement. The film's hardest question is how much risk anyone owes to people who cast them out. The form is arid and narrow: a few rocks, a way station, a small number of characters. The camera uses the wide landscape to measure distance rather than to celebrate it. The source is a novel by Elmore Leonard. Martin Ritt and Paul Newman had worked together before, and the Newman here has dropped his usual charm entirely; he barely speaks. Fredric March plays one of the passengers and Richard Boone the outlaw. Who it is for: viewers who like the morally hard westerns of the sixties. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the hero to be rewarded; the film refuses that outright.