Tired Trapper

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE MOUNTAIN MEN Directed by Richard Lang Screenplay by Fraser Clarke Heston

It has been eons since anyone has made a movie like this one, in which white men and Indians endlessly and mindlessly bash away at one another. Scripts about the Indian wars probably do not have to deal with weighty matters like racism, as revisionist film historians insist. But the typical skulk-and-scalp epic today appears feeble even just as entertainment.

The Mountain Men concerns a trapper (Charlton Heston) who in a battle with a band of Blackfeet acquires an Indian maid (Victoria Racimo). For the rest of the film her Indian master (Stephen Macht) and Heston have at each other for possession of the lady, yet the struggle is not developed with much style. There is none of the menace and mystery that attended a similar conflict in Robert Redford's 1972 Jeremiah Johnson, which also dealt with the trappers who first explored the West. Brian Keith is at his best as Heston's raffish companion. But Heston seems emblematic of what is wrong with the film. He strives to be as free-spirited as a wanderer of the wilderness should be, but the ease that comes naturally to Keith is beyond him. He is a tired act, and this is a tired movie.

--By Richard Schickel

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