The Unforgiven (1960)

THE UNFORGIVEN  (1960)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Huston
    Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Audie Murphy,
    Lillian Gish, Charles Bickford, Doug McClure,
    John Saxon, Albert Salmi, Joseph Wiseman
In a sort of reversal on John Ford's "The Searchers", Audrey Hepburn plays a young woman who was taken from the Kiowa as an infant and raised by white settlers after the massacre of an Indian village. Now it's 20 years later, and a Kiowa warrior claiming to be her brother has found out her whereabouts and a war party has come to take her back, and the racism that's never far from the surface on the frontier starts to boil over. What makes this interesting isn't the storytelling or the execution, which are fairly routine, but the varying levels of bigotry represented by the main characters. The source material's a novel by Alan LeMay, who wrote "The Searchers", and if you keep an eye on Doug McClure in the final shot - the way he stands with one arm crossed in front to clasp the other at about the elbow - that's a direct reference to John Wayne at the end of Ford's movie.