The Outsider

Ira Hayes, who left the Pima reservation in Arizona to enlist in the Marines, becomes one of the men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. That photograph makes him a national hero overnight. He is put onstage on war bond tours, applauded, and then sent home to a place where nothing has changed. The film is not interested in heroism. It is interested in what becomes of a man declared a hero: Hayes can neither stay at the front nor find a place in peace. It shows his alcoholism and his trauma directly, which was a bold choice for 1961. The form is black-and-white war drama: the landing, the training camp, the bond tours and the provinces. The combat sections are short and everything else is long. Delbert Mann directed. The source is an article about Hayes by William Bradford Huie, with a screenplay by Stewart Stern. The best-friend character is not real but a composite drawn from two of the men who raised the flag. Tony Curtis plays Hayes. A white actor playing a Native character is the film's most disputed aspect today; Curtis's own work is counted among the most serious attempts of his career. Who it is for: viewers who like films about post-war trauma and sixties Hollywood biography. Who it is not for: anyone attentive to representation. Most of the Pima characters are played by white actors and life on the reservation is built from an outsider's view.