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    The Born Losers and Billy Jack

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    cody
    Tom Laughlin was a renaissance man who wrote, directed, and starred in exploitation films in the 1960s-70s that addressed social issues. His breakout success was 1967's The Born Losers, which introduced the iconic character Billy Jack, a Native American Vietnam veteran who defends the weak. Though Laughlin was white, he portrayed Billy Jack's sincerity and championed Native American rights. The sequel Billy Jack from 1971 focused more on peace and the ethics of violence but was slower paced. Laughlin's films were shocking yet heartfelt mixtures of exploitation and sincerity.

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    The Born Losers and Billy Jack

    Uploaded by

    cody
    73 views4 pages
    Tom Laughlin was a renaissance man who wrote, directed, and starred in exploitation films in the 1960s-70s that addressed social issues. His breakout success was 1967's The Born Losers, which introduced the iconic character Billy Jack, a Native American Vietnam veteran who defends the weak. Though Laughlin was white, he portrayed Billy Jack's sincerity and championed Native American rights. The sequel Billy Jack from 1971 focused more on peace and the ethics of violence but was slower paced. Laughlin's films were shocking yet heartfelt mixtures of exploitation and sincerity.

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    Even more film reviews by Josha Petronis-Akins.

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    Tom Laughlin was a renaissance man who wrote, directed, and starred in exploitation films in the 1960s-70s that addressed social issues. His breakout success was 1967's The Born Losers, which introduced the iconic character Billy Jack, a Native American Vietnam veteran who defends the weak. Though Laughlin was white, he portrayed Billy Jack's sincerity and championed Native American rights. The sequel Billy Jack from 1971 focused more on peace and the ethics of violence but was slower paced. Laughlin's films were shocking yet heartfelt mixtures of exploitation and sincerity.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    73 views4 pages

    The Born Losers and Billy Jack

    Uploaded by

    cody
    Tom Laughlin was a renaissance man who wrote, directed, and starred in exploitation films in the 1960s-70s that addressed social issues. His breakout success was 1967's The Born Losers, which introduced the iconic character Billy Jack, a Native American Vietnam veteran who defends the weak. Though Laughlin was white, he portrayed Billy Jack's sincerity and championed Native American rights. The sequel Billy Jack from 1971 focused more on peace and the ethics of violence but was slower paced. Laughlin's films were shocking yet heartfelt mixtures of exploitation and sincerity.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 4

    Josha’s Exploitation Station: Tom Laughlin

    By Josha Petronis-Akins

    A-Movie: The Born Losers

    Years ago, I watched a documentary about Australian exploitation cinema called Not

    Quite Hollywood. The movie is now a happy blur, and I didn’t bother to watch it again

    for this article. One fragment which I can still remember involves an appearance by

    Quinten Tarantino. Basically, he said that when he watches a movie, he wants to be

    shocked. He wants to not be able to believe what he’s watching.

    I thought of this when I saw The Born Losers. This low-budget bikersploitation

    picture killed at the box office not once but twice: in 1967 when it was a sleeper hit,

    and again in 1974 after its auteur Tom Laughlin had become famous and infamous

    around the world. I choose to write about it not just because it’s the

    less-remembered original appearance of Tom Laughlin’s awesome Billy Jack

    character, but because I think it’s an untouchable classic.

    Tom Laughlin was the writer, director, and star of most of his movies. Although he

    worked mainly without involvement from major studios, he managed to both bring in

    huge audiences and influence movies which were actually considered respectable

    by critics. He was a renaissance man: a high school and college football star who

    married a cheerleader, an author of books on Jungian psychology, a practitioner of

    martial arts, a self-taught filmmaker, a born-again flower child, and the founder of a

    Montessori school.
    I haven’t nearly seen all of his movies yet, but it seems like he incorporated all these

    interests into them at every chance he got. He also liked to address any and every

    “ripped from the headlines” social issue, not just for cheap exploitation, but because

    he wanted you to know his own opinions. In 1960, a 29-year-old Laughlin wrote and

    directed his first movie, called The Young Sinner. In it he starred as a high school (!)

    football champion expelled after being caught in bed with his girlfriend. The movie

    wasn’t actually released until 1965, so it failed to break him out of an unremarkable

    1950s acting career, whose highlights were a small role in South Pacific and a

    leading role in an exploitation youth gang movie called The Delinquents. He followed

    his obscure teen sex film with an obscure college sex film, called The Proper Time.

    Laughlin’s real breakout success, and what I assume is his best movie, was a

    violent, low-budget outlaw biker movie called The Born Losers. I won’t discuss its

    plot very much because I don’t want to spoil it, and because I don’t know what The

    Active Page will be comfortable printing. Instead, I’m going to focus on the main

    character: Billy Jack.

    Billy Jack is one of the greatest heroes in cinema, inspiration to Steve McQueen’s

    acting career, basis for the original First Blood novel, and by extension the original

    Rambo. This character is an expression of Tom Laughlin’s values and ego, and so

    he can only be played by Tom Laughlin, who masterfully sells every aspect of the

    character, except for one. Billy Jack is a Native American ex-special forces Vietnam

    veteran who hates war and wants nothing more than peace. He lives zenned out in a

    trailer in the woods, at one with nature. The people of the town below shun him

    because he’s Native American. He doesn’t want any trouble, but when he sees the

    weak being oppressed, he can’t stop himself from stepping in. He rides a motorcycle

    (and in the sequel, a stallion), wears an iconic denim outfit, and is trained in Hapkido.
    He’s a ruthless killer, but can also be a gentle, fatherly figure to someone who needs

    it. He loves animals and keeps his money under a mattress because he doesn’t trust

    banks.

    Laughlin actually invented a version of the Billy Jack character as early as 1953 with

    the specific intention of raising awareness of the plight of Native Americans. He tried

    continuously to get some kind of movie involving the character greenlit, and was only

    able to do so more than a decade later, after he quickly wrote a script which

    exploited the trend of outlaw biker films.

    Almost the whole time I watched The Born Losers, my jaw was on the floor. The

    movie was so shocking that I had to spend a couple of days processing it before I

    could properly sit down to write this review. Once I had finished digesting the most

    outrageous moments (including a hilarious-in-the-sense-of-Mommie-Dearest

    mother-daughter scene which reminds me of Rebel Without a Cause), I had to

    contemplate the film’s paradoxes: it’s lurid, yet compassionate; exploitative, yet

    sincere. In fact, the overwhelming sincerity mixed with tastelessness is probably

    what makes Tom Laughlin movies so special.

    The elephant in the room, so to speak, is the fact that Tom Laughlin was white. It’s

    not mere trivia that his Billy Jack character is Native American: it’s an important part

    of the plot. Throughout The Born Losers, he’s racially abused by many of the film’s

    characters, and his racial identity becomes even more important in the sequel. It also

    becomes more distracting when we see him beside actors who are actually Native

    American. I do want to insist that Tom Laughlin was coming from the best possible

    place in deciding to play a Native American character, and I’m sure it never occurred

    to him that he could be offending anybody.


    B-Movie: Billy Jack

    “On this reservation, I am the law!” says a still lily-white Tom Laughlin to the corrupt

    sheriff in Billy Jack, the better-known sequel to The Born Losers. To my bafflement,

    many people consider this movie to be an improvement on the original: I guess it’s at

    least more original and ambitious, although it doesn’t come together nearly as well. A

    few years after the events of the first movie, Billy has returned to his Lakota

    reservation, which is now host to a hippie commune called The Freedom School.

    He’s taken it upon himself to protect the gentle hippies from the evil sheriff and his

    impudent rapist son. Meanwhile, he prepares for a shamanic initiation. The central

    theme is whether violence and vigilantism can be justified in the cause of peace and

    equality. Roger Ebert, characteristically missing the point, said that the film’s

    conclusion is “fascist.” I say it’s tragic, nuanced, and anything but.

    Tom Laughlin has a real talent for filming Spaghetti Western type posing and scenes

    of tension and violence. It’s a shame then that Billy Jack is so indulgently focused on

    showing off the flower child artwork and musicianship of Tom Laughlin’s friends and

    family through the vehicle of The Freedom School. The first half of Billy Jack is very

    slow, but I recommend it for its dated charm, amazing performance from Tom

    Laughlin, and its genuinely provocative take on ethics.

    There are more movies in the Billy Jack series, and I haven’t seen them yet. Maybe

    I’ll cover them in a future issue of The Active Page.

    If you have an idea for a movie for me to review, send me an email at

    [email protected]

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