Cinema: The Scalphunters

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This amusing western has a racial equality angle, an avalanche, a locoweed stampede, Shelley Winters chomping cigars, and Agnes—an educated horse that sits on its rear end for a strategy conference with Burt Lancaster. Most important, it has Ossie Davis, one of the nation's finest Negro actors.

Davis is beguilingly guileful as a runaway slave who changes hands like a dirty dollar. He is captured by a band of Indians, who unload him on Fur Trapper Lancaster as "payment" for the load of skins they steal from him. The redskins, in turn, are zapped by a batch of bounty hunters, who earn their living by selling Indian scalps for $25 apiece, and Davis gets himself captured by these private enterprisers. Their queen is Shelley Winters, a refugee from a fancy house. She nurses her stogie on a brass bed in the covered wagon of the No. 1 Bad Guy (Telly Savalas) and keeps complaining about the smell from the scalps.

The scalpers have Burt's furs now, so he trails them as they trek, scheming to get his own back, while Davis makes himself useful around the wagon (at one point he gives Shelley a wash and set that would do credit to Kenneth or Alexandre). The rest of the movie is devoted to Lancaster's strata gems—this is where the brilliantly photographed avalanche and the stampede come in—and Davis' rather pat redemption from the psychological bonds of slavery. In the end, the scalpers get their just deserts, of course, and the Indians get revenge, plus Shelley. Who rides off into the sunset? Ossie and Burt, both of them on Agnes, and so caked with mud that they are the same color—a brotherly beige.