Hombre Reviews

The 1960s were an interesting time for the western. The Searchers in 1956 pointed the way towards the revisionism and hard look at the genres racial attitudes, and by the time that films like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Hombre came around, the western was an all-new, slightly foreign genre. The clothing and vast desert wastelands remained the same, but suddenly there wasn’t the black and white moralizing. Shades of grey had taken over, and the western became a safe place to explore racial attitudes of the day by wrapping them up in garments from the Wild West.

Hombre borrows the central conceit from another Ford classic, Stagecoach, in that it views the stagecoach as a small fragment in which to explore the greater outlook of life. It also borrows the central character being something of an anti-hero, a tortured man who doesn’t fit entirely in any one place but makes his home wherever he wanders but would like to make a connection with someone. Of course, John Wayne wasn’t playing an American Indian like Paul Newman is here, but that is eventually explained. Hombre is a white man who was raised as an Apache and exists in an existential area where he doesn’t feel comfortable in either world.

Newman’s performance relies a lot upon his good-looks staring soulfully outwards and laying bare raw emotions of crisis and longing for a whole identity. Sure Hombre lacks originality in many of its narrative structures and character developments, but a well-worn genre done very well is always a great thing to view. And Hombre is very much a very well made piece of genre movie-making. Of course there’s a big shootout at the very end, the characters all come to respect the main character, and he does find his place in society, but that isn’t what stuck with me. Reread what I’ve written and you’ll see an emphasis placed on the film’s identity politics. That is what stuck with me, and when Hombre focuses in on the character’s journey of coming to terms with himself it moves with a grace and intelligence that is quite pleasing to behold.