Cinema: Descent from Suribachi

The Outsider (Universal-International). The most famous photograph of World War II was Joe Rosenthal's Pulitzer Prize picture of six marines planting the Stars and Stripes on the summit of Mount Suribachi, the highest point on Iwo Jima. Three of the marines were later killed on Iwo; the three who survived became national heroes. But one of the survivors, a Pima Indian named Ira Hayes, was killed by that snapshot as surely, if not as swiftly, as by a bullet.

Summoned home by a grateful government, Ira and his buddies were met with brass bands, bronze stars, microphones and cocktail shakers. They were thanked in person by President Roosevelt and hustled off on a coast-to-coast tour of war-bond rallies. Unhappily, all the attention was too much for Ira. a nice simple country boy of 22. He began to hit the bottle and hit it hard. After the war, he kept right on drinking; in 13 years he was arrested 51 times for being drunk and disorderly. He lost job after job, wound up on Chicago's Skid Row. On Jan. 24, 1955, Ira stayed up all night drinking muscatel with four other Indians in a desert shack on the Pima-Maricopa Indian reservation near Phoenix, Ariz. Next morning he was found not far from the shack, dead. He had strangled on his own vomit. He was 32.

Ira's tragedy has been dramatized often enough before—on TV, in tabloids and in Wolf Whistle, a novel by William Bradford Huie—to raise the question: What is the point of retelling the story now? The moviemakers do not seem to know, and in their confusion they have failed, in fact, to tell the story as it happened. The ugly facts of Ira's life are conscientiously prettified in his favor. In the first half of the picture he is interpreted by Tony Curtis as a sensitive, "deep"' young man who is forced to play the hero when he wants to be himself; as a sort of noble savage corrupted by civilization. But in the last 50 minutes of the film the interpretation collapses. Ira seems merely what the script at one point calls him: "another drunken Indian." If that is all the moviemakers can make of their subject, they might better have let him rest in peace.