I know a lot of you reading this haven’t walked the Earth as long as I have, so you don’t realize how enormously popular Tom Laughlin’s Billy Jack was in the early 70‘s. This weird mix of counterculture philosophy and kick-ass action in a (not really) Amerind horse trainer in a cowboy hat was featured in five movies, but the significant ones were 1971‘s Billy Jack, 1974‘s The Trial of Billy Jack, and this picture...and they were shown in theaters almost perpetually. There were grindhouses here in NYC that would play all three films on the same bill. He was a ubiquitous pop culture figure of that time....and it all began here, and what really strikes me is how the franchise aspect of this key franchise in early 70‘s Grindhouse Cinema was so...tacked on. There is an introductory sequence with female lead and screenwriter Elizabeth James building up Billy Jack’s legend over footage of him roaming through the woods, and a curious outro (and we’ll get to why this is curious momentarily)...but for the bulk of the film, he’s almost a minor character. So much of the film is focused on James’ Vicki, who is a...problematic protagonist. James spends almost all of her time dressed in white, particularly a white bikini, acting like a smart ass and making very bad decisions...until the film requires her to be the scared little flower wilting against Laughlin’s chest. To say the messages this film conveys to the audience are mixed is an understatement.
It’s a very mean film filled with very nasty characters--even the sympathetic characters seem spurred on by negative emotions (Jane Russell, playing the mother of a raped teenager, is so aggressive in protecting her child that you’re almost scared for the kid even if the biker gang doesn’t get their hands on her). There is so much hostility on display here that it blunts what I think is what the script is trying to promote, namely that we have to stand up to protect each other, or else all is lost.
And then there’s That Ending....
(Warning: I’m about to spoil a movie over 50 years old. Deal with it.)
All throughout the film, we’re led to believe that the title refers not only to the titular biker gang, but to the protagonists themselves. We see how Billy Jack is about to be foreclosed on and how Vicki is ignored by her father. There are several scenes of Billy Jack being written off or mistreated for being a Native American--even though Tom Laughlin looks nothing like a Native American. There’s even a...comical? scene where a diner patron explains how Billy Jack and Vicki are doomed because of their zodiac signs. All this is set up so that Billy Jack acts as the hero, saves Vicki and, by extension, the town from the tyranny of the bikers...only to be killed himself by the cops by...accident? who have come to back him up. We even see Laughlin shot and lean back as if dead on top of the motorcycle he’s escaping on. Sure, it’s heavy handed, but it works thematically in the context of the two hours we just spent with these characters....
Except that it’s not the ending--we get this outro that, like the intro, seems to have been shot separately from the rest of the film, where Vicki discovers a still-living Billy Jack, declares her love and has him airlifted to a hospital. I guess I can see why they put these bookends on, since Laughlin was probably already planning to make Billy Jack a franchise. But it puts a sour note on an already sour movie, and muddies what I think was initially intended.
The Born Losers is an important film in the development of genre cinema....but I don’t know if I can recommend it. It’s ugly, kinda unpleasant and manages to mess up the thematic and narrative points it was trying to make. Use your discretion.
