Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.
There’s still a few Westerns on The List for me, and that’s something of a point of pride for me. I’m not a big fan of the genre in general, although I don’t specifically dislike it. Still, I’ve made it a point to get through a bunch of them, or to at least watch them regularly so that I’m not stuck with a couple dozen of them at the end. It’s been a couple of weeks since I spent time with a horse and saddle picture, so I figured I might as well hop back into that saddle, as it were, and cross off another one. In this case, the film in question is Hombre from the year of my birth.
Just as a lot of good science fiction is more or less a story that happens to take place in a futuristic setting and several good Westerns (like The Ox-Bow Incident) are tales that simply use the Western setting as a backdrop, Hombre is a morality tale about bigotry and racism that simply happens with a stagecoach and horses. John Russell (Newman) is a white man who was raised by Apaches, and the inherent racism of others for his upbringing drives the entire narrative.
