Paul Newman’s Best-Rated Western Isn’t 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,' It’s This Thrilling Movie From Two Years Before

Paul Newman was instantly put in the Western Hall of Fame after starring in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, being the loser and shaggier half of one of the genre's greatest duos. While Newman starred in various other Westerns, none eclipsed the mystique of that Oscar-winning classic and how far its shadow stretched into future buddy movies. That said, it isn't actually the Newman Western that people seem to like the most. According to Rotten Tomatoes, Hombre, a movie he made two years earlier, is the most acclaimed Western of his. This makes sense, as Hombre is a more traditionally plotted yarn, but one that's a satisfying time capsule in its depiction of race relations. Hombre currently holds a 94% score on Rotten Tomatoes while Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid sits with an 89% critics' score.

What Is 'Hombre' About?

John Russell (Newman) is a white man who was raised by the Apache tribe to be a warrior, but he's come back to town to get his inheritance. He gets back ownership of a boardinghouse that he immediately sells off, much to the chagrin of most of the town's inhabitants. He winds up leaving town on a stagecoach full of patrons who have a distaste for him, largely due to their prejudice against him and his defiant lone-wolf status. When the stagecoach gets held up by a band of thieves who hold one of the stagecoach members for ransom, Russell is the only one who can effectively defend the stagecoach and save the hostage from more harm, if he can be convinced to help at all. The plot is largely no different from the likes of Stagecoach, but Hombre is far more interested in the bubbling tensions between the various characters trapped in a hopeless situation, tapping into all the ways in which these people barely coexist without tearing each other apart.

'Hombre' Is an Oddly Aged Examination of Racism

Like another harsh Western based on an Elmore Leonard novel, Hombre may have the meat and potatoes goods for Western devotees, but it's got more on its mind regarding its thorny interpersonal dynamics. It slowly unfurls its plot in favor of exploring the often unspoken racism that permeates throughout the group, as his stoic and selfish demeanor aggravates their sense of him as an "other." The film comes down emphatically on the notion of radical empathy and aid for all, regardless of who "deserves" it, a remarkably progressive notion for the time. This is done with mixed effectiveness, as the film's casting of white actors as minority characters largely undermines the performative anti-racism on display. Russell is supposed to be a white guy, but it's hard to take the film's message in good faith when every other Native American is played by a white person in bad brown makeup; for instance, Martin Balsam plays Mendez, the Hispanic coach driver. While that kind of racist casting wasn't abnormal for this era of Hollywood, it's especially blunderheaded here, since it draws attention to the cowardice of the story in having the character be white instead of an actual Native American.

'Hombre' Puts Its Selfish Characters In a Pressure Cooker

The film fares much better when it focuses on its expertly crafted tension, aided in no small part by James Wong Howe's boiling cinematography, emphasizing the stickiness and dry heat that everybody endures. Under the direction of Martin Ritt (who had previously worked with Newman on another subversive western, Hud), the film squeezes a lot of juice out of Leonard's characters by exploring how everybody's desires and selfishness are gradually exposed. The stagecoach members only really try to look past their racism when they actually need Russell to save them. Some of the stagecoach robbers are actually seemingly honorable members of the town they have just left, desperate for some kind of change in their lives. Even Russell is largely unmoved by the need to save human lives and would much rather hold onto the stagecoach's money, only doing so out of sheer survival rather than most appeals to morality. It's another instance of Paul Newman's ability to overpower the pronounced flaws of his anti-heroes by being so cool and is so comfortable in how much he doesn't bother conforming to others' expectations of him. Perhaps it's that combination of star power with a complicated sense of justice that makes this film so beloved.

Hombre can be watched in the US on Prime.

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