Billy Jack
Encyclopedia : B : BI : BIL : Billy Jack
Billy Jack is the second, and highest grossing, in a series of motion pictures centered around a fictional character of the same name, played by Tom Laughlin. The film was released in 1971.
Plot
Billy Jack is a Native American Green Beret Vietnam War veteran, hapkido master, and gunslinger. The character made his début in The Born Losers (1967), a so-called "biker film" about a motorcycle gang terrorizing a California town; Billy Jack rises to the occasion to defeat the gang by defending from their wrath a college student who has evidence against them for gang rapes. The first film was considered the typical drive-in theater fare of the period, described by Entertainment Insiders reviewer Rusty White as "pure exploitation, but with something extra."This changes with the second film, Billy Jack, in which the hero must defend the hippie-themed Freedom School and its students from the machinations of racists. The school is organized by Jean Roberts, played by Laughlin's wife, Delores Taylor, who also appears in each subsequent film.
The movies go to some length to explain how the anti-establishment pacifist philosophy of the Freedom School can be reconciled with the martial arts and gunplay featured prominently in the plots of the films. Billy Jack hit on a potent formula with this message in 1971, and the film went on to become one of the highest grossing of its time, and remains among the top 100 when the list is adjusted for inflation.
Billy Jack helped launch the martial arts craze that swept the United States in the 1970s. It was arguably the first American film to feature a non-Asian lead character who used the martial arts as his primary weapon of defeating the villians. The style of martial arts used in the film is the Korean art of Hapkido. Though Laughlin, a Brown Belt in the art, performed many of his own fighting stunts, it was Hapkido Master Bong Soo Han, who performed the advanced techniques.
Two controversial scenes were noted by filmgoers and reviewers. In one, Jean (Taylor) is raped by Bernard (David Roya), the corrupt son of the county's most successful (and ruthless) businessman. The scene includes a wide-angle establishing shot of Jean tied to stakes on the desert floor, nude. In the second scene, as Bernard sits with a woman in his car at a lake, he uses a switchblade to cut her bra and demands she take it "all the way off." Billy and Jean arrive, rescue the woman ("Will you look?" she asks Billy, to which he responds, "Probably."), and force Bernard to drive his Corvette into the lake.
Billy Jack's wardrobe (black T-shirt, blue denim jacket, blue jeans, and a black hat with a beadwork band) would become nearly as iconic as the character. The film's theme song, "One Tin Soldier" by Coven, became a Top 40 hit in 1971, and featured the chorus:
- 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 blowin' come the judgment day
- On the bloody morning after, one tin soldier rides away
Films in the series
- The Born Losers (1967)
- Billy Jack (1971)
- The Trial of Billy Jack (1974)
- Billy Jack Goes to Washington (1977)
Laughlin's website mentions plans to make another sequel, entitled Billy Jack's Moral Revolution which, according to the film's synopsis, hopes to "lead a nationwide protest march to force Bush and Cheney to give up Iraq as an oil colony and stop the endless flow of blood by getting the hated Americans out of Iraq immediately."
See also
References
Footnotes
External links
- [Official site]
- [Review of Billy Jack] at badmovies.org
- [Review of Billy Jack] at Invasion of The B-movies.com
- [Entry for Billy Jack] at the IMDB.
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.