The flower-child yin to Dirty Harry's Republican yang, if only either movie were that simple. Broncos get rounded up for slaughter until Tom Laughlin, the titular hero, materializes on horseback, a black Stetson crammed flat across his forehead; cowboy as paradox, a disillusioned ex-Green Beret, half-Indian and full-on sensitive badass, complete with Korean martial-arts that allow him to crush the snouts of enemies with the soles of his feet. And a pacifist to boot, or trying to be one, at least, in order to aid his beloved schoolmarm Delores Taylor, who runs the hippie-haven Freedom School amid a sea of redneck scorn. As befits a Nixon-era rouser, intergenerational conflict fuels the narrative -- adolescent Julie Webb, pregnant after an earlier commune experience, gets KOd by Kenneth Tobey, her police officer dad, and takes refuge at Taylor's place, where a rainbow of peace-loving, guitar-strumming, finger-painting kids reside as long as they provide personal art. Directed by Laughlin and scripted with Taylor, his wife (all under pseudonyms), the film is the couple's own contribution, a Cassavetesian home reel, or a documentary -- on the travails of personal filmmaking, on the couple's beliefs, on Laughlin's fluency in karate ass-whomping and Method-mumbling, on a messed-up epoch where Doing Your Own Thing carried promises of revolution, particularly when it meant reincarnation as a motorcycle Jesus. Their utopia is fragile: Billy Jack welcomes rattlesnake bites to rise silhouetted against an orange sky as the reptile's blood brother, but Taylor's peacenik undergoes a less exalted rite, rape at the hands of detestable papa's boy David Roya. The ultimate '70s incoherent text, pace Taxi Driver: "Damn your pacifism" co-exists equally with "You can't solve everything by violence," and the film's oxymoronic impulses are duplicated in Laughlin's abrupt mise en scène, tight framing for the fight sequences and loose medium-shots for the Committee's ad-libbing theater, choreography and improv, actors and nonprofessionals... fascism and Marxism? The government and media forces await outside, the outsider hero takes up his love's passive resistance and gives himself up to The Man, the Panthers' clenched fist raised for peace, one final contradiction before Billy's off to his Trial. With Clark Howat, Bert Freed, Stan Rice, Susan Foster, Victor Izay, and Howard Hesseman.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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