Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

Jugu Abraham The subject and the story are commendable. A revisionist Western if there was one. Racism against the native Indians is highlighted. So are the negative traits of the white men who made money out of the subjugation of the the native Indians. Even the attitudes towards Mexicans are well etched.Ultimately, the film is all about values and humanism and less about killing.The opening sequence of the black stallion leading wild horses is amazing.Ritt is a director who was a cut above the rest, especially his films on anti-racism (Edge of the City, The Great White Hope). He chose his subjects well.Commendable performances (Newman, Boone and Balsam) and a good script.

Zettelhead No need to tell that the cast is fantastic and the camera impressive.What impressed me the most were the use of time and the dialogues. The movie is extremely slow but never looses its tension. This is done in a way that seems to be forgotten in cinematography nowadays. Still the whole movie looks astonishingly modern.And the dialogues are just perfect. Deep, multi-layered, minimalistic. Probably the best written western ever - next to Garden of Evil (Frank Fenton) and Terror in a Texas Town (Dalton Trumbo).Same for the story: there is a clear similarity to stagecoach, but this time the evil guys are the white man. The only reasonable human, the white man raised by apaches, representing not a race but just a culture, wastes his life in that awkward moment, when he is dragged into the dubious moral concepts of the white.Wow!

James Hitchcock This is an example of what I have come to think of as the "Stagecoach plot", although it was not invented in John Ford's film of that name, nor is it confined to the Western genre. Maupassant's "Boule de Suif" was an early literary example, and other cinematic examples include Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes" set in a disguised Nazi Germany, "The Journey", set during the Hungarian Revolution, and "North-West Frontier", set in British India. The basic idea is that a disparate group of people are forced by circumstances to travel together in a single vehicle on a dangerous journey through hostile territory. As one might expect from a Marxist director like Martin Ritt, "Hombre" brings a revisionist slant to this basic plot. It is one of a number of Westerns from the fifties and sixties which sought to call into question the heroic "Myth of the West" and the assumptions (such as "white men good, Indians bad") on which many earlier Westerns had been based. The "hombre" of the title is John Russell, a white man who has been raised amongst the Apache. Upon hearing of his father's death, Russell returns to the white world to collect his inheritance. A sequence of events leads to him travelling in a stagecoach with a mixed group of others. When the truth about Russell, namely that he has been brought up by Indians, becomes known, he faces prejudice from the other passengers, who force him to sit outside with the driver. When the stagecoach is robbed, however, the others are forced to rely upon Russell's tracking skills to lead them to safety.In terms of plot there is nothing particularly ground-breaking about the film; what makes it "revisionist" is its treatment of Native Americans. Among the passengers on the coach are Dr Alexander Favor, an Indian agent, and his wife. The reason why the robbers hold up the coach is that their leader, Cicero Grimes, has discovered that the Favors are carrying a large amount of money. It transpires that Dr. Favor has embezzled this money, which was meant to buy food for an Apache tribe, with the result that the tribe have been hit by famine. Favor is outwardly a civilised, cultured intellectual, but his veneer of respectability only serves to disguise an underlying dishonesty and selfishness. It is ironic that a man like Favor affects to despise Russell as an uncivilised half-savage. This was the sixth and final film which Ritt made with Paul Newman. (I have only seen one of the others, "The Long Hot Summer"). Newman plays the leading role, and yet the amount of dialogue spoken by him is surprisingly small. Russell is a laconic man of action who prefers to speak through deeds and gestures rather than through words, in contrast to the garrulous Favor. Newman gives an excellent performance; although he does not say much, his is a commanding, authoritative presence who holds the audience's attention throughout. He receives good support from some of the other cast members, notably Fredric March as Favor, Richard Boone as the thuggish villain Grimes and Diane Cilento as Jessie, another passenger on the coach. The action takes place in the Arizona deserts, and the pale, bleak, sun- baked look of the film is appropriate to the location. The main colours are greys, dull greens and pale blues and browns. A few ends are left untied, especially the story of the feuding young married couple Billy and Doris. (Billy will play an important role in the denouement, but the story of his marriage to Doris, which seemed to play a major part in the early scenes, is neglected). Overall, however, this is a taut, well-made Western in which the differences between the good guys and the bad guys is rather more blurred than had often been the case in the genre. 8/10

tieman64 "The Indians must conform to 'the white man's ways', peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. They must adjust themselves to their environment, and conform their mode of living substantially to our civilisation. This civilisation may not be the best possible, but it is the best the Indians can get. They cannot escape it, and must either conform to it or be crushed by it. The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed, and the family and the autonomy of the individual substituted." - Commissioner Thomas Morgan Director Martin Ritt and actor Paul Newman made several films together. One of their best was "Hombre", a 1967 revisionist western. The film's a masterpiece of the genre, but receives little notice today.The plot? Newman plays John Russell, an Apache-raised white man living in 19th century Arizona. When his father dies, Russell learns that he has inherited a house and land in the town of Bisbee. The film's first act thus watches as Russell – essentially emblematic of persecuted Native Americans – journeys out of the wilderness, sets upon his new home and struggles to acclimatize to both modernity and western civilisation.The film's second act then leaps off into another director. Here Ritt introduces us to a number of wildly divergent characters. Foremost amongst these is Jessie (Diane Cilento), a middle aged woman who struggles to survive in the Arizonan deserts. Hardened by time, she's a unique mixture of self-sufficiency and neediness. Like the other two women in the film – one wealthy, one a pauper, both sexually dissatisfied – she's also been repeatedly burnt by men. Mirrored to the three women are men in positions of power. One's a soldier, one's a sheriff, one's a professor in charge of taking care of Indian Reservations (essentially concentration camps in which Native Indians were housed). Each character betrays his position of authority and reveals himself to be a corrupt, selfish brute. By the film's end, the only positive male roles will be assigned to a Mexican man, Henry Mendez, and Newman's John Russell, both marginalized or minorities.The film's third act then essentially becomes an existential morality play. Here the film's title, which means "man" in Spanish, alludes to mankind in a more generalised, philosophical sense. In Ritt's hands, all men, and indeed all civilisational institutions, are seen to be inherently corrupt. Because we view the world through John Russell's eyes, a man who has been persecuted all his life and who has learnt to both keep his distance and view others with apathy and scorn, Ritt's nihilistic stance is seductive. This easy seduction is questioned, though, during the film's highly abstract final sequences, in which community, altruism and self-sacrifice are positioned on one hand, and ego, individualism, apathy and selfishness are positioned on the other. Various characters are asked to jump from one extreme to the next, but it's only John Russell who makes the leap, risking his life to save men and women who'd readily watch others rot if it made them a buck.What's odd about "Hombre" is how much it says about the treatment of Native American Indians without actually being about Native American Indians. The film's racism is mostly alluded to and treated as unspoken, psychic ripples. Elsewhere there are possible allusions to then contemporary civil rights issues (Russell excluded to the top of a stagecoach, like African Americans shunted to the backs of buses), and it is hinted that it's not Russell who has come to civilisation, but he who brings civilisation to Arizona; he who shows "them" how to act like a "man", and "they" who must learn to conform to him.One must remember that Ritt was once a radical leftist who had loose affiliations with various communist or left-leaning movements, a fact which got him blacklisted during the Hollywood's horrible Witchhunt Years. Ritt's films can themselves be divided into loose groups. One group tends to be preoccupied with watching as characters, who represent the modern ethos of capitalism, come into contact with their opposites ("Hud", "Hombre" etc). Another group focuses on the lives of the marginalized, often African Americans who struggle with various socio-economic problems ("Sounder", "Conrack", "The Great White Hope" etc). Yet another chunk of Ritt's films tend to deal with groups or organisations being infiltrated and undermined by the literal or figurative foot-soldiers of either communism or capitalism ("Norma Rae", "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold", "The Molly Maguires"). "Hombre" belongs to the first group, but Newman's character is also very much like the spies of "Cold", "Molly" and "Norma Rae", infiltrating groups and changing them from within."Hombre" was shot in Death Valley and around the Halvetia Mines. It features some fine photography by James Wong Howe, director Martin Ritt's camera work is simple but classy, Richard Boone impresses as a craggy villain, and the film, quite interestingly, moves from melodrama to abstract, philosophical ordeal, its characters slowly dying, dehydrating and climbing absurd stairs seemingly torn out of the Myth of Sisyphus. Unsurprisingly for a film derived from a book by Elmore Leonard, the film's dialogue offers a kind of blunt poetry.Incidentally, this period saw a number of excellent revisionist westerns ("Sitting Bull", "McCabe", "Bad Company", "Soldier Blue", "Little Big Man", "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid", "Broken Lance", "Hud" etc). Most of these films are overlooked when discussions on Westerns arise. Those westerns which are praised, in contrast, tend to merely be giant allegories for the passing of an era and its assorted totems. Nostalgic (and oft reactionary) films which pine for a specific type of outlaw masculinity, most of these Westerns are thin (Leone, Ford, Peckinpah etc), using steam-engines, railways, machine guns, or blaze of glory bloodbaths as clunky "metaphors" for what is essentially the death of a false image.8.9/10 – A strong Western, marred only by silly early scenes featuring Newman in a wig. Worth two viewings.