1971@50: BILLY JACK

A western town at the dawn of the '70s. The local honcho rustles mustangs with the aid of some good ole boys and a local deputy. Well he would if Bill Jack would let him but the trim ex-green beret peacenik who appears on horseback with a particularly persuasive manner and shuts it all down. Not before the big guy's son has humiliated his dad in front of the totin' rustlers by refusing to take a shot at one of the horses. Meanwhile that deputy has to take delivery of his runaway daughter, back and knocked up from a year in the post-Manson Haight Ashbury. Her dad is so enamoured of her plight that he slaps her around and she's a runaway again. This time she heads to the local free school in the desert, initially to hide out but soon gets into the groove of the place. It's run by an old earth mother called Jean who both lived through the '60s and remembers it. That's why she is running the school. Vietnam is still on and the draft is still on. Nixon's in the White House and the '70s are about to rewrite America.

Over the credits comes a staccato flute figure which blooms into a pop fable about a brutal village that wages war with another for a treasure that is just a piece of paper that says "peace on Earth". We've already seen Billy Jack and we've also seen the guy who really runs the town and even his malcontent son. The song tells us what to expect. So, the plot here is a lot less to the fore than its character elements. Hippy vs straight, if you like. Rebel vs conformity. New vs old. 

And this is just a hair past the Woodstock generation and its more grounded than the freedom trek in Easy Rider. There are things at stake. Sometimes they are drawn with a broad and sloppy brush but sometimes we get nuance, detail and some real cinema to tell the story. Billy Jack is like a lot of loner western heroes in that he seeks his own way but is drawn into others and has to confront that with violence. As with Shane he does it to protect the vulnerable. But it's 1971 not 1871 and there's no way of getting on a chestnut mare and riding over the horizon. It's the era of war and unrest on the news and iconic demons of the establishment in faceless riot gear. We can cheer all the small victories we want (and there are some glorious such moments on screen here) but we know how the battle ends and that, like the war that never seemed to end over in South East Asia, the big guns are backed by big money and power. That admission is what lifts Billy Jack from the mass of hippy vs cop exploitationers that rubbed shoulders with the bikie movies and the rest of it. Antonioni had had a decent stab at suggesting a new kind of American legend in the then recent Zabriskie Point but this one dragged the old mythology from the screen that gave birth to it and placed it around the corner on the day you saw it.

Which is why Billy Jack survived the worst of my uniform anti-hippy stance during the punk wars: it works and keeps working despite me wanting it to fail. I saw it as a kid in a family that seemed to be half hippy (upper middle class hippies, like they all seemed to be but still...) and the notions of social justice were welling up around us. I was indulged to grow my hair enough to be taunted by a pair of pencil sharpened local kids who taunted me with the word hippy as though that was going to work. I can remember stopping in the holiday Kombi by a beach and a posse of the local crew cuts came to stare at us longhairs in the front seats. The appearance of being on the other side was enough for them. We were the flagrant enemies of the great Australian way and our punishment was to receive the stares of cretins for the term of our natural lives. Well, that lasted until the late '70s when all of them had long hair to go with their neat casual attire and I started cutting mine to declare myself gleefully back in the margins. It wasn't just hair, of course, it was the whole damn culture and that's what got us roused in the cinema when this movie was on and then again when it ran on late night tv. You can get rady to scoff at the hamfisted message of peace but as soon as you see how it's really turning out you have to ditch all that.

I hung around the radio if One Tin Soldier came on and I wished you could get it played more. My sister sang the song that even in my not-yet-ten mind was a cringe: "When will Billy Love Me?" And now, most recently, watching it again as a fifty year old movie, I sat up and followed the moments of the story, the acting that was better than I recalled and the fable that worked a treat however much it was compromised by hokey ritual or vintage jive talk. The two stoners skit and the role reversal improv with the town elders are still funny. The end is still sobering. And way back, the sound of my voice along with everyone else in the hip Miss Samson's music class on a lazy afternoon at school as the glare burned out the North Queensland scenery:

Go ahead and hate your neighbor. Go ahead and cheat a friend

Do it in the name of heaven. You can justify it in the end

There won't be any trumpets blowing come the judgment day

On the bloody morning after 

One tin soldier rides away

Nothing, whether I admitted it or not, got me readier for punk rock than that hippy chorus.