Thanks for the memories!

Great Film overall

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Light Western comedy about the particular relationship between a fur trapper and a highly polish slave , including a colour-coded cultural confrontation . It's an entertaining story with a touch of peculiarity , some great characters , a colorful cinematography , an amazing music and is funny enough . Solid western with interesting events , violent fights , emotions , humor , thrills and spectacular outdoors . Forced to trade his valuable furs for a well-educated escaped slave (Ossie Davis) , a rugged trapper (Burt Lancaster) vows to recover the pelts from the Indians and later the renegades that killed them . As the pair forms an uneasy alliance , as when the pelts are in turn and result to be appropriated , they set off in pursuit a band of cutthroats led by a cynic bandit (Telly Savalas) . The trapper will stop at nothing to take back what's his .An amusing enough liberal comedy western that has its fun moments , entertainment , action and some violence . Enjoyable as well as amiable screenplay by William Norton , it is exciting enough and glosses both the interdependence among protagonists and their racial antagonism . This plot about a peculiar conflict between a rough , illiterate trapper and a cultured slave is well worked through a chronic circular premise . Very good acting by the great Burt Lancaster as a fur trapper who sets out in pursuit the robbers . Sympathetic Ossie Davis as Joseph Lee , a slave who helps Lancaster to fight enemies and retrieve the pelts . Perfect Telly Savalas as leader of a gang of Scalphunters who has appropriated the furs . Secondary cast is frankly nice such as Shelley Winters as Kate , Dabney Coleman as Jed , Dan Vadis as Yuma , Armando Silvestre as Two Crows and the Lancaster's best friend , Nick Cravat , as Yancy . Splendid cinematography in Panavision and glimmer Technicolor by Duke Callagham and Richard Moore as is reflected on spectacular outdoors filmed in sighting , gorgeous natural landscapes. As it was shot on location in wonderful natural parks from Durango , Mexico . Lively and rousing musical score by the maestro Elmer Bernstein composing one of his best soundtrack .Professionally produced by a great production company formed by Arnold Laven , Jules Levy and Arthur Gardner . The first Levy-Gardner-Laven movie was 1952's "Without Warning"'; in the decades since, they have produced and directed dozens of additional features and especially Westerns . They are experts on Western genre as cinema as television as they produced and directed several TV series including "The Rifleman," "Law of the Plainsman," , "The Big Valley" . The motion picture was well directed by the recently deceased Sidney Pollack with a thankfully light hand . Sydney was an excellent director , producer and secondary actor with several hits on all kind of genres as ¨The Interpreter¨ , ¨The firm¨ , ¨Out of Africa¨ , ¨Tootsie¨, ¨Yakuza¨ and directed two magnificent Westerns , ¨Jeremiah Johnson¨ and this ¨Scalphunters¨ . Rating : Good , better than average and worthwhile watching . The flick will appeal to Burt Lancaster fans and Western buffs .

A year before Sydney Pollack hit it big w/"They Shoot Horses Don't They" he made this comic western riffing on the phrase "now you have it, now you don't." Burt Lancaster & Ossie Davis are paired up as the strangest of bedfellows trying to get Lancaster's wares back from a marauding band of scalp hunters led by Telly Savalas & Shelley Winters.Alternately funny & sharply acted, this late 60's entry further pushed the envelope on what Western's were soon becoming.Like the other great American art form jazz, this Western upends many of the stalwart modes we had become used to & plays like an extended riff on a kid's game w/gunfights & a last minute calvary save (in the guise of a pack of Indians) thrown in for good measure.

"The Scalphunters" opens with an illiterate frontier fur trapper named Joe Bass (Burt Lancaster) refusing to trade his furs, with the Kiowa Indians, for a runaway field slave… But at the end, he is forced at gunpoint to do that and Bass finds himself, in one moment, the owner of Joseph Lee (Ossie Davis), an escapee from Louisiana, formerly of the Comanche tribe, until stolen by the Kiowas… Lee, an African—slave by employment, black by color—results one of the highest educated families in Louisiana, who can read and write… Lee's intention was to circle south, as far as Mexico, because the Mexicans have a law against the slavery trade… Bass' immediate plan was to catch up with the Kiowas and get back his pack horse and furs… But his plan soon failed when a band of scalphunters led by a dangerous double-crosser, Jim Howie (Telly Savalas) attack the poor Indians killing almost all of them and taking, by the way, Bass' property… Bass— a man who moves mountains to get what he wants— stampedes their wagons and makes the scalphunters' horses dangerous to ride… The sweetest, and in some ways the funniest moments come out when Bass talks to his horse… In one scene, he gets so excited, and turns back to his stallion saying: "By god, you have got an idea!" Telly Savalas makes Kojak a charmer, but in Pollack's film he is a psychopathic bounty hunter who slaughters a dozen Indians… Kate (Shelley Winters)—a cigar-puffing doxy qualified to do things to any man—is sick about her lover's wagon… She complains that she lives like a squaw… Kate's dream was to live like a lady in a fancy house with servants… Winters delivers the best line of the whole movie when she exclaimed at the end of the film: "What the hell? They're all men."Ossie Davis comes out with a real sense of humor… In one scene he explains to Kate the benefits of the common cactus, known to the Comanches as Maguey… He makes her believe that this plant was used in the ancient times by the Queen of Sheba to restore the natural oils to her beautiful blond hair… It was nice to see Nick Cravat in a modest role as one of Savalas' men… As you remember, Cravat was ideally cast as Lancaster's sidekick, Piccolo, in the flamboyant "The Flame and the Arrow" in 1950, a spoof of the Robin Hood genre, set against the castle battlements and banquets halls of medieval Lombardy

Visually striking but odd and unsatisfying western that suffers from long stretches of boredom and not being able to decide if it's a comedy or a serious action film. It also features Telly Savalas as one of the more pointless villains in western cinema, though he does turn in a watchable performance with what little he was given. Shelly Winters is along for the ride too, in an even more pointless role as his floozy. It's as though the studio was nervous about the bare script and needed to pack the production with as much star power as possible.And the script is bare. Burt Lancaster loses his furs to a party of Kiowa indians , who saddle him with unwanted runaway slave Ossie Davis in return. In pursuit of his furs, Lancaster sees them taken over by Savalas' band of 'Scalphunters' and the story plays out until the end as a game of cat and mouse with Davis in the middle. That's it. A nearly two hour film in epic widescreen and the story is as scant as that.Except when Lancaster and Davis butt heads physically and philosophically, the film is a washout. Their scenes together, providing a few good laughs, are the only reason to stick it out till the end.Entertaining in a low key way, Lancaster is always worth seeing, but hardly a good western. A blip on Sydney Pollack's filmography.