Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Console best movie i've ever seen.

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

classicsoncall It seems like the theme of the movie expressed in my summary line, a quote from Joseph Winfield Lee (Ossie Davis) to Joe Bass (Burt Lancaster), was used again in 1982 with Stallone's "First Blood". The analogy is apt, Joe Bass uses his tracking and hunting skills to avenge the theft of his winter stock of furs, first stolen by the Kiowas, and then again by Jim Howie's (Telly Savalas) 'Scalphunters'. Throughout the ordeal I thought to myself, it doesn't seem like there's that many furs to be all that bothered about, an assessment also shared by Lee, so there were at least two of us on the same page.So Lee mentioned at one point that his Kiowa name was Black Feather, stolen by that tribe when they raided the Comanches. It made me wonder if that was really part of Lee's background or was he just making it up as a way to deal with Bass. I guess it works either way, though nothing else in the story ever pointed to his having spent time with Indians.I had to laugh when Savalas's character called himself a curly haired, blue eyed angel, but you'd probably have to catch a film that came out a few years later to see him with hair. That would have been as the title character in 1972's "Pancho Villa", which in it's own way explains how he wound up bald. You'll just have to see it.The weirdest thing that caught my attention in the story was when Lee and Bass went at it near the end of the picture, and Bass took advantage of what looked like a trampoline jump out of a ditch to continue fisticuffs with his rival. There's no way he could have managed it from a standing position, so borrowing that page from the Euro-West spaghetti tradition was cool to see. Not to mention how mud caked the two men got to cement their relationship as partners riding off into the sunset.But by and large, my own pick for the unsung hero in this Western had to be the pack horse carrying the furs and getting rustled every which way depending on who the more belligerent force was at the time. A close second of course would have been Bass's own horse who could stop on a dime when the situation called for it. That was pretty slick of Lee to try it out for himself.

doug-balch This is a pretty good movie that is worth watching. The acting is excellent, with nice performances by Burt Lancaster, Ossie Davis, Shelly Winters and Telly Savalas.Burt Lancaster seemed to particularly enjoy his role. Ossie Davis really holds the movie together. Shelly Winters is hilarious and Salavas does a very creditable job.I only had a couple of issues with the movie:The title "The Scalphunters" is beyond ridiculous. This is a comedy, and a pretty good and subtle one.At the beginning of the movie, a gang of twenty white men on horses ambush a group of ten or so drunken Indians, whom they brutally gun down and graphically scalp. This was such an intense and horrifying scene that I didn't realize until half way through the movie is actually a comedy.Other user reviewers on this site pointed out the anachronism of the repeating rifles. Because Ossie Davis' character is a slave, the movie must be set in the pre-Civil War period, when there were no repeating rifles. Lancaster's trapper character is well cast for the pre-Civil War west, but I'm not sure about Salavas' criminal gang. They claim the "territory" has set a bounty of $25 per Indian scalp. I'm not sure if any U.S. territory ever did that. I know the Mexican government did. They are on their way to Mexico. Maybe this is why. They claim to in the business of bank robbing, but I don't think there were ever many banks in the areas that fur trappers operated. Overall, I was confused by the historical context.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx Oh serendipity! Picked up the disc of this one for next to nothing at a closing down sale with little or no conviction regarding the content. But it's glorious, and a real sleeper.What I really love about Burt Lancaster is the guy's enthusiasm; as Captain Vallo in Siodmak's light-hearted 1952 movie "The Crimson Pirate" you can see him really bounce around the set, emotionally and physically. It's no surprise to me that the guy was a circus acrobat before he was a movie star. And in 1968 the bounce is still there: at one point in the Scalphunters he jumps clean out of a high ditch. And it's not just Burt who's full of enthusiasm, you got Ossie Davis giving him a run for his money, and Telly Savalas (as the baddie), who always appears to me to have been a bit bored in straight roles, completing a trio of guys having an absolute ball. Incidentally I think that enthusiasm is why Lacaster's great transcendent role in "The Swimmer" (1968 - same year as this one) is so heart-breaking, because he's playing a bust enthusiast, and you can see it.The title "The Scalphunters" is severely misleading, makes it sound like the movie is about Indians killing folks. There's nothing, not a damn thing, about this movie that's straight like the type of boring western I was expecting.It's a movie that teeters on anarchy, and at the end gives a real one-fingered salute to any notion of reality. The key is delivered early on by Joe Bass (Lancaster): "there we are Joseph Lee, in the Garden of Eden just like Adam and Eve". It's a sublime adventure movie, never at any point in the movie do you see civilisation, the world here is all wide open country, ripe for quests, japery, and antics. I had that rosy feeling at one point that I got from reading William Morris (this pre-Raphaelite, mostly known for his textiles, was the first writer to set a novel in an entirely-created fantasy world, and you can feel the freshness in what he wrote because of it). Somehow the landscape where this film is shot is very strange, like a dusty place that's just received a torrent, there's green shoots and sparkling sunlight everywhere; this helps with the uncanny feeling.The dialogue is top whip, and full of sass. Shelley Winters is there as well, and gets a lot of praise for this movie, though I found her mostly distant support.Structurally, it's a circular movie, which I love, and is lovely; there's something wonderful about circles, about their lack of finiteness compared to most lines, which are just broken circles! Apologies for the esotericism of that comment.I haven't mentioned it yet but a lot of the movie thematically is about race relations. Ossie Davis' black character (Joseph Lee) is an escaped slave. The clever idea was for a little bit of role reversal, Joseph Lee is a genteel educated city slicker whilst Joe Bass is an illiterate thoroughly practical trapper. Although the movie is really funny and completely absurd (in a good way), there are moments of genuine heat in discussions about race between the two men. In the same key, when the comedy sublimates into action, the action scenes tend to be pretty snappy. The race wisdom here never ever appears preachy, and is often hilarious as well, like the time Joseph Lee tries to convince Bass that he's not a negro but a Commanche.Interstingly at one point Joseph Lee tells Bass that he's a good man because he likes his Bible and knows about Ham, the black man in the Bible. That's a line that's pretty easy to skate over, but I looked it up. Apparently Ham was one of Noah's sons, and, for a sin that isn't made too clear in Genesis, had his skin turned black as a curse - else his son Canaan's skin was turn black - and later migrated to Egypt where he became the father of the African peoples. This was used for a long time as a scriptural precedent for slavery, ie. God cursed Ham and all his descendants, and that slavery for them was just the natural order of things. I like me a movie like that, where just a throwaway remark can act as a diving board and have you swimming around in new perspectives and ideas.I've tried to give you the flavour rather than the story, as the flavour is the point. Hope that's OK.This is for Jen (Juliet Echo November), who is my friend.

Bogmeister Wildly entertaining western romp with the still athletic Lancaster (as a frontier trapper) and Davis (as runaway slave) reluctantly teamed against a band of bandits led by Savalas. I noticed this pic as good time fun during a TV showing as a kid, way way before the nice DVD version, and still have fond memories of an easygoing adventure. Lancaster is exuberant in this, despite being well into his middle-aged years; he still comes across as someone who can outfight any man and rassle a grizzly bear on the side. He also presents an iconoclastic character here, supremely content onto himself, with not much use for civilization OR anarchy (represented by the barbaric bandits). Just leave him to do his own thing; if you don't, you're in for a fight - don't matter who you are, as Savalas and his band find out.Savalas is great as the bandit leader, dangerous blow-hard that he is; though not too intelligent, he's still a lot smarter than the other idiots under his rule (including a bearded Dabney Coleman in an early role). His main squeeze is the cigar-chomping floozy Shelley Winters, hamming it up as much as the otherwise all-male cast. Davis, in an odd contrast, comes across as the most sophisticated of the whole bunch, despite supposedly being a slave his entire life; he also proves to be the most duplicitous; he's not simply honorable and disappoints Lancaster more than once. Maybe director Pollack was sneaking in some commentary on the outmoded superior standing of the white race by this point, though I think it was wishful thinking that Davis could get away with as much as he does here in the 19th century. In all, the actors prove to be good hams to the very end.