The Sheriff (1971)

          After opening with a moderately exciting bank robbery and chase, which introduces audiences to the title character of even-tempered Southern California lawman James Lucas (Ossie Davis), The Sheriff gets down to business with a creepy scene of White traveling salesman Larry Walters (Ross Martin) menacing young Black woman Janet Wilder (Brenda Sykes). The ensuing (offscreen) sexual assault triggers a crisis in the mixed-race town that Lucas polices, which in turn spirals Lucas toward a crisis of his own—not just because the rape victim’s boyfriend is the sheriff’s son, but also because Lucas’s deputy, Harve (Kaz Garas), is married to a racist. All of this is fairly lurid stuff, and The Sheriff has shortcomings common to ’70s telefilms. The standard 74-minute runtime necessitates obvious storytelling, the aesthetics are cheap (what’s with backyard scenes shot on a soundstage?), and the horn-driven score lends a distractingly upbeat quality to an otherwise a downbeat narrative. Nonetheless, a couple of elements make The Sheriff respectable. Arnold Perl’s sturdy script is humane and reasonably thoughtful, while leading man Davis imbues the whole piece with dignity, purpose, and restraint.

          Presumably designed as a pilot for a series starring Davis—who at the time enjoyed prominence as an activist, director, performer, and theater artist—The Sheriff announces its intentions fairly early. When Lucas identifies the rape suspect as Caucasian, he asks his deputy to join him for the suspect interview because Lucas knows his word won’t be enough to indict a White man. Similarly, the choice to center Lucas’s son pulls the story into predictable but useful thematic terrain; impassioned Vance Lucas (Kyle Johnson) is impatient for social progress, whereas his father has reconciled himself to achieving incremental gains whenever possible. Adding an X factor to this dialectic is the attitude of Cliff Wilder (Moses Gunn), the father of the rape victim—as the sheriff’s chronological peer, Cliff recalls the bad old days when White men abused Black women with impunity, leading Cliff to consider frontier justice.

          Although nothing in The Sheriff would have been groundbreaking in 1971, the way the movie blends multiple race-related provocations gives the piece a measure of validity. So, too, does the overall quality of the acting. Martin, best known as the comic-relief sidekick on ’60s series The Wild, Wild West, essays one of several odious villains he portrayed in ’70s TV movies, and it’s to his credit that he neither injects vulnerability into his character nor comes across as a cartoon—Martin’s performance captures the most infuriating type of morally bankrupt entitlement. Others appearing in the movie include Davis’s real-life partner, Ruby Dee; reliable character players Edward Binns and John Marley; and ’60s/’70s starlet Lynda Day George. Everyone delivers solidly professional work, even when Perl’s dialogue tips into melodramatic extremes, so it’s tempting to believe the cast perceived The Sheriff as a worthy endeavor instead of just another small-screen paycheck gig.

The Sheriff: GROOVY

The Trackers (1971)

          Apparently Sammy Davis Jr. spent some time looking for a project in which he could costar with John Wayne, leading to development of The Trackers. Somewhere along the way, the project lost Wayne, director Burt Kennedy, and the potential for a theatrical release, instead becoming an inexpensive telefilm directed by small-screen workhorse Earl Bellamy and costarring Ernest Borgnine. It’s probably for the best a glossier version of this project never materialized for two reasons: 1) Davis seems way out of his element playing a formidable lawman, and 2) the plot follows the familiar formula of Black and White characters who overcome racial animus when thrown together by circumstance. As a brisk TV movie with household-name actors, The Trackers makes for a pleasant 74 minutes of disposable entertainment—but stretching this content out to feature length would have brought its shortcomings into sharp focus.
          Sam Paxton (Borgnine) is an amiable rancher with a wife and two adult children until one day when raiders attack his property, kill his son, and kidnap his daughter. Initial efforts to find the evildoers prove fruitless, so Sam writes to a lawman friend who specializes in tracking. Unable to help because of an injury, the friend sends Ezekiel Smith (Davis), which aggravates Sam’s racism. (He fought for the South.) Nonetheless, once Ezekiel demonstrates his prowess, Sam agrees to ride with the Black lawman even as the trail leads closer and closer to the Mexican border. Since there have been roughly a zillion movies about men from different worlds forced to work together, you know how things go from there—Sam and Ezekiel vacillate between bonding and squabbling. In reflective moments, they share stories and find common cause. In combustible moments, they physically assault each other. A few beats are played for mild comic relief, but for the most part The Trackers aims for a serious tone.
          It’s tricky to buy Davis in his role, not just because he seems so modern but also because he’s so physically slight—in one particularly eye-rolling moment, Davis’s character holds his own in an extended brawl with Borgnine’s character even though Borgnine looks as if he could snap Davis’s spine like a twig. Related, Davis’s performance feels artificial and bland compared to the believable intensity Borgnine brings to nearly every scene. As always, Borgnine’s performance style is more about blunt force than nuance, but his animalistic approach suits the role and the storyline. He’s actually quite engaging here, so it’s moderately satisfying to watch his character describe an emotional arc, however predictable and trite.

The Trackers: FUNKY

Hardcase (1972)

          In the great 1966 Western The Professionals, mercenaries enter Mexico to rescue an American’s wife, who was supposedly kidnapped by a revolutionary, only to discover the wife has become romantically involved with the revolutionary. A twist on that premise drives the agreeable made-for-TV Western Hardcase, starring former Cheyenne star Clint Walker and Stefanie Powers. Ex-soldier Jack (Walker) returns from POW incarceration to discover that his wife, Roz (Powers), not only ran off with revolutionary Simon (Pedro Aremendáriz Jr.) but, thinking Jack dead, sold his ranch to buy supplies for Simon’s rebel band. Hardcase, titled for a nickname someone hangs on the stoic protagonist, dramatizes how Jack responds to this conundrum. This telefilm is so light on plot that it resembles an episode of some generic Western anthology; similarly, the piece has the over-lit aesthetic and unimaginative camerawork of vintage episodic television. Yet Hardcase boasts a reasonably intelligent script, by Hollywood veterans Harold Jack Bloom and Sam Rolfe, and the narrative successfully ensnares its protagonist in a fraught moral dilemma. As a result, the movie is simple without being wholly simplistic.
          Anyone who has encountered a Walker performance knows better than to expect nuance from his acting—his towering physicality and granite features lend so much visual impact that he if he aims in the general direction of a dramatic texture and doesn’t exert himself, he’s able to put across something adequate. Powers is similarly limited in her abilities. Perhaps that’s why they make a compatible duo in Hardcase—the boundaries of his skills suit a character who has difficulty expressing emotion, just as the boundaries of hers fit the character of a woman torn between conflicting loyalties. Meanwhile, Aremendáriz Jr. capably offers a frontier riff on the Paul Henreid role from Casablanca (1942) and former NFL player Alex Karras, in his first proper movie performance, lends a mix of amiability and grit. The dramatic beats these actors perform get plenty of screen time because the movie doesn’t have much action—or, for that matter, much tension. It’s tempting to guess that Hardcase is so gentle because it was the first live-action movie from kiddie-animation specialists Hanna-Barbera Productions. 

Hardcase: FUNKY