The Trial Of Billy Jack

Only in the 1970s could THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK have been made, and only then could this pretentious, windy three-hour chore have been an enormous hit.

According to the film’s late producer, director, and star, Tom Laughlin, who passed away earlier this month at the age of 82, TRIAL earned $30 million at the box office in just its first thirty days of national release, which would have made it easily the most successful film ever at that time. It isn’t a good film, but it’s certainly unforgettably unique with its occasional bursts of violence, strident yet sincere left-
wing politics, and frequent unintentional hilarity that you may at first believe to be parody until you realize Laughlin has no sense of humor.

Really, this is one of the craziest movies I’ve ever seen. Kung fu Vietnam vet Billy Jack (Laughlin’s third time out after THE BORN LOSERS and BILLY JACK) is serving a four-year prison stint for the events of BILLY JACK, and the pacifist Freedom School run by his platonic friend Jean (Delores Taylor, Laughlin’s real-life wife) is shot up by the National Guard! Most of the film is told by Jean in flashback form from her hospital bed, and Laughlin’s grisly staging of innocent children being slaughtered by Guardsman would never occur in a film today and certainly not with a PG rating!

Laughlin and Taylor have a lot of bones to pick, and they pick them all. Child abuse (a student plays guitar with a hook after an abusive parent cut his hand off in a fit of rage), government corruption, racists, the rights of Indians, police brutality—all are countered with folk singing and lots and lots of preaching. Upon Billy’s release, he explores his Native American half by experiencing hallucinations during a drug trip; slaps a construction worker, a hippie protestor, and Jesus Christ (!); and encounters his mystical, blue-painted double in the “Cave of the Dead.”

A virtually plotless film, THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK jumps from one social issue to the next, which means a potentially exciting subplot about Jean and Billy Jack organizing a search party into snowy mountains to rescue stranded Indians, who then go untreated at a “white” hospital, is truncated into five or six minutes. The acting is quite bad, though its natural amateurishness sometimes works in its favor (Laughlin leaves in a part where Teda Bracci blows a line, laughs it off, and repeats it correctly). Balancing the clumsy performances are technical values that are impressive for an independent vanity picture, such as Jack Marta’s overwhelming widescreen nature cinematography and Elmer Bernstein’s score.

Laughlin dishes out a little of Billy Jack’s backstory, including an arresting flashback in which he witnesses a massacre of Vietnamese women and children by American soldiers, in this bizarre mixture of peacenik sincerity and exploitation. Billy returned one last time in BILLY JACK GOES TO WASHINGTON, which barely played theaters. CBS aired TRIAL in a three-hour prime-time slot in 1980 and again on THE CBS LATE MOVIE in 1984.

Just A Fight To Survive

From time to time, I plan to use this space to repurpose film reviews I wrote for several local independent newspapers during the previous decade:

THE OCTOPUS: 1999-2000
CU CITYVIEW: 2002
THE PAPER: 2003-2004
THE HUB: 2005-2006

During my tenure as a professional (re: paid) film critic, I wrote about both new releases and cult classics. The date provided below is the date the newspaper issue containing the review hit the streets.

This review has been slightly edited from the original published piece.

BILLY JACK (1971)
Rated PG
Running Time 1:54
Directed by Tom Laughlin
Stars Tom Laughlin, Delores Taylor
Originally published May 12, 2006

BILLY JACK is nothing less than one of the most popular motion pictures ever produced. It isn’t much of a stretch to say that few movies released this decade, if any, will be as profitable or be seen by more people than BILLY JACK was in its theatrical releases. The story of a half-Indian and ex-Green Beret who protects a schoolful of teenaged hippies from bigots, BILLY JACK is a testament to the tenacity and confidence of Tom Laughlin, who produced, wrote, directed, and starred in the film as Billy Jack.

Although BILLY JACK was a tremendous hit in the early 1970s, it can be something of a chore to watch today. Much of it has dated terribly—for instance, the drug humor of the improvisational group The Committee (including a long-haired Howard Hesseman) and the folk music performed by the flower children characters—but BILLY JACK’s stances against individualism, non-violence, and racial intolerance are as relevant now (or more so, as Washington extremists strive to plaster Red and Blue labels over us) as ever.

The story behind BILLY JACK is a fascinating one. The leading character portrayed by Laughlin had already appeared in a biker movie, THE BORN LOSERS, which American International released in 1967. Laughlin, who produced and directed that picture too, held on to the rights to Billy Jack, and after THE BORN LOSERS became a hit, he landed financing from Warner Brothers to do a bigger-budgeted sequel called BILLY JACK, which first came out in 1971.

Warners, in Laughlin’s view, buried the film on the bottom of double bills in dirty, disreputable theaters, so he sued the studio and received the right to release the movie his way. The Laughlin method was to travel around the country “four-walling” theaters—renting the auditoriums himself, playing BILLY JACK in them, keeping all the box office receipts, and giving the theaters the concession profits. Laughlin and his family (who also appeared in the movie) made personal appearances to support the release, and relied on massive regional television advertising to get the word out. BILLY JACK, which was already something of a hit in 1971, was a veritable smash upon its 1973 re-release, breaking box office records across the country and turning its karate-kicking anti-hero into a household name.

BILLY JACK is nothing if not ambitious. It preaches about so many subjects—gun control, education, racism, the generation gap—that the film often falls into tedium. The script is by Laughlin and his wife Delores Taylor, who plays Jean, the teacher at the Freedom School, where troubled teens go to escape their uncaring families or recover from bouts with drugs or other dangerous lifestyles. One is 15-year-old Barbara (Julie Webb), who escaped her abusive father Mike (Kenneth Tobey), ran off to Haight-Ashbury, got pregnant, came home to a beating from her father, and found shelter at Jean’s school, where she begins a loving relationship with an Indian boy. Their mixed-race relationship is a burr under Mike’s saddle, spurring him to create trouble around their small Arizona town for the students, who are also harassed by weak Bernard (David Roya), the son of venal town boss Posner (Bert Freed).

Luckily for Jean and the kids, they have a protector in Billy Jack, one of Hollywood’s few liberal action heroes. Laughlin’s clenched though charismatic performance makes Billy Jack an interesting character. He learned to kill in Vietnam, where he saw so much senseless bloodshed that he makes a strong effort to return to his Native American roots and avoid the violence of the White Man’s world, even though mankind’s inhumanity to his fellow man forces him to seek justice using the skills taught to him by the government, namely hapkido karate.

If you’re patient enough to endure BILLY JACK’s pitfalls, there’s much to admire. Yes, when the Laughlins’ daughter Teresa begins caterwauling her way through a self-penned folk ballad about her dead brother, you’ll want to strangle her. However, Laughlin does an okay job staging his action scenes, which attempt to preach non-violence, while simultaneously stimulating us with shots of Billy Jack kicking bad guys in the face. Few cinematic moments are more moving than the opening title sequence involving an illegal roundup of wild mustangs, beautifully shot by cinematographer Fred Koenekamp and set to Coven’s affecting Top 40 hit “One Tin Soldier.” The acting is variable with hardy character actors like Tobey (THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD) and Clark Howat (as the sympathetic sheriff) doing nice work and amateurs such as Taylor barely able to recite dialogue with a vestige of emotion. But what the lesser actors lack in technique, they make up for in honesty and earnestness.

This cinematic ode to tolerance and peace also has one classic moment that’s the stuff of Hollywood legend. Bernard and his posse harass the children in an ice cream parlor by pouring flour over the head of a cute little girl. Billy Jack waltzes in and gives a long speech about beautiful young angels mistreated by idiotic savages. Then, he “...just...goes...BERSERK,” freaks out, and kicks the crap out of the hoods. Irony or Laughlin’s commercial instincts kicking in?