Having to explain the phenomenon of Billy Jack to a twenty-something Canadian is simply impossible. She's never been to a Drive-In in her life, never went through a Bruce Lee or an Evel Knievel phase, and never had One Tin Soldier drilled into her psyche while smoking marijuana rolled in licorice papers.
What's going to happen when we get around to posting Joe, Panic in Needle Park, or...God forbid...Bless the Beasts and the Children??? We're fucked.
From Roger Ebert:
"Billy Jack" was not only the first film by Tom Laughlin and Delores Taylor since "Born Losers" (1967), but in many respects the same film, with the same hero and the same theme. Both films were directed by Laughlin himself, using the pseudonym of T.C. Frank, and they represent a passionate obsession with the role of violence in society. Laughlin and Taylor surface so rarely because their movies are personal ventures, financed in unorthodox ways and employing the kind of communal chance-taking that Hollywood finds terrifying. The chances they take sometimes create flaws in their films, but flaws that suggest they were trying to do too much, never too little.
What I find interesting is that they decided, in effect, to remake their earlier film: not to copy it, but to grapple again with the same identities and ideas. Both films are about a character named Billy Jack (Laughlin), who is a returned Vietnam hero, half-Indian, a master of karate, who takes the law into his own hands because he believes that's the only way to obtain justice.
In "Born Losers" an outlaw motorcycle gang terrorizes a community and its sheriff's office. When they brutally beat a teenager, Billy Jack steps in and shoots one of them. He gets ninety days. The gang members get a slap on the wrist for assault. But when he gets out of jail he finds the police powerless and the community terrified. So, because he feels he must, he fights them again, using karate, gasoline, Indian tricks, and his rifle.
In "Billy Jack," the same character has become more mythic and supernatural. "We don't know how to contact Billy Jack," one of his friends says. "We communicate with him Indian-style; when we need him, somehow he's there." And indeed he is, riding his horse or motorcycle out of the woods, an almost supernatural presence. This time the town is terrorized, not by a bike gang, but by a brutal local businessman and his half-crazy sadomasochistic son. With the exception of the sheriff himself, who has good intentions but is ineffectual, the local law officers are on the side of evil against good.
"Good" is represented by a freedom school run by Delores Taylor, "where children can come when they have no place else to go." The townspeople (who are conveniently represented as hateful, violent, and prejudiced) resent the "hippie school," but it's on an Indian reservation and thus accountable only to federal law.
The daughter of a deputy sheriff runs away after a beating and is hidden at the school, and this provides the food for the plot: The deputy and the other bad guys go after Billy Jack, who single-handedly cuts them down with karate blows, etc. The kids and staff at the school are all pacifists, but Billy Jack can't buy that. His morality is a simple Old Testament one, an eye for an eye.
There are a lot of things in "Billy Jack" that are seriously conceived and very well-handled. Some of the scenes at the school, for example, with real kids experimenting with psychodrama, are interesting. Some of the action scenes are first-rate. There's a lot of dialogue, mostly involving putdown of the older generation.
But the movie has as many causes in it as a year's run of the New Republic. There's not a single contemporary issue, from ecology to gun control, that's not covered, and toward the movie's end you're wondering how these characters -- who are just ordinary folks in a small Southwestern town -- managed to confront every single ethical hurdle in a few weeks of living. It's possible, I guess, but it would keep you awfully busy, and then there are always the Jews in the Soviet Union to think about, and the Pakistan refugees.
I'm also somewhat disturbed by the central theme of the movie. "Billy Jack" seems to be saying the same thing as "Born Losers," that a gun is better than a constitution in the enforcement of justice. Is democracy totally obsolete, then? Is our only hope that the good fascists defeat the bad fascists? Laughlin and Taylor are still asking themselves these questions, and "Billy Jack" arrives at a conclusion that is only slightly more encouraging.
Technical Information:
Title: Billy Jack
Year: 1971
Country: USA
Director: Tom Laughlin
Source: BluRay Retail
Video Codec: 720p x264
Container: .mkv
Size: 6.55 GB
Length: 1:54:36
Programs used: Unknown
Resolution: 1280x720
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG4 AVC H264 @ ~8500 kb/s
Frame Rate: 23.97 fps
Audio: English- DTS 5.1 @ 1536 kb/s
Subtitles: None
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