"...the damnedest mixture of different sorts of movies you've ever seen...It has a lot of hard action in it. It has social comment. It has broad farce. It has comedy." — Roger Ebert
Directed by Sydney Pollack
A Western with a blistering satiric edge, The Scalphunters finds Burt Lancaster again embracing an unsavory character as Joe Bass, an ornery frontier trapper who is forced to give up a wealth of furs in exchange for an escaped slave, Joseph Lee, played by Ossie Davis. When Bass subsequently loses Lee to a band of even more loathsome scalphunters (headed by Telly Savalas and Shelley Winters), he wages a one man war across the desert to reclaim his "property." Balancing sharp wit, racial politics and the violence of revenge, the film culminates in an extended, mud-soaked fist fight that's a true classic of the genre.
United Artists. Producers: Jules Levy, Arnold Laven. Screenwriter: William Norton. Cinematographer: Duke Callaghan. Editor: John Woodcock. Cast: Burt Lancaster, Shelley Winters, Telly Savalas, Ossie Davis.
35mm, color, 103 min.
Watch the trailer below.
