5/5 classic western
  by David Bennett (seattle usa)
This is a classic wetern. often overlooked. Great stuff from Telly Savalos and Shelly Winters. Lancaster is tough and cool as usual.

3/5 Pollack directed the film with a sense of humor unexpected in the genre...
  by Roberto Frangie (Leon, Gto. Mexico)
"The Scalphunters" opens with an illiterate frontier fur trapper named Joe Bass (Burt Lancaster) refusing to trade his furs, with the Kiowa Indians, for a runaway field slave... But at the end, he is forced at gunpoint to do that and Bass finds himself, in one moment, the owner of Joseph Lee (Ossie Davis), an escapee from Louisiana, formerly of the Comanche tribe, until stolen by the Kiowas...

Lee, an African--slave by employment, black by color--results one of the highest educated families in Louisiana, who can read and write... Lee's intention was to circle south, as far as Mexico, because the Mexicans have a law against the slavery trade...

Bass' immediate plan was to catch up with the Kiowas and get back his pack horse and furs... But his plan soon failed when a band of scalphunters led by a dangerous double-crosser, Jim Howie (Telly Savalas) attack the poor Indians killing almost all of them and taking, by the way, Bass' property... Bass-- a man who moves mountains to get what he wants-- stampedes their wagons and makes the scalphunters' horses dangerous to ride...

The sweetest, and in some ways the funniest moments come out when Bass talks to his horse... In one scene, he gets so excited, and turns back to his stallion saying: "By god, you have got an idea!"

Telly Savalas makes Kojak a charmer, but in Pollack's film he is a psychopathic bounty hunter who slaughters a dozen Indians...

Kate (Shelley Winters)--a cigar-puffing doxy qualified to do things to any man--is sick about her lover's wagon... She complains that she lives like a squaw... Kate's dream was to live like a lady in a fancy house with servants... Winters delivers the best line of the whole movie when she exclaimed at the end of the film: "What the hell? They're all men."

Ossie Davis comes out with a real sense of humor... In one scene he explains to Kate the benefits of the common cactus, known to the Comanches as Maguey... He makes her believe that this plant was used in the ancient times by the Queen of Sheba to restore the natural oils to her beautiful blond hair...

It was nice to see Nick Cravat in a modest role as one of Savalas' men... As you remember, Cravat was ideally cast as Lancaster's sidekick, Piccolo, in the flamboyant "The Flame and the Arrow" in 1950, a spoof of the Robin Hood genre, set against the castle battlements and banquets halls of medieval Lombardy...

5/5 DEN
  by D. Newcomb
I consider this one of the great movies. I have watched it dozens of times and it never grows old. It is a witty, funny, dusty, tough, mean, fabulously entertaining Western. Burt Lancaster, Ossie Davis, Shelley Winters and Telly Savalas play their roles with masterful technique. I consider it a 5 star movie.

5/5 LANCASTER AND DAVIS AT THEIR BEST
  by Kay's Husband (Virginia, U.S.A.)


This movie is one that is very easy to like, while having a solid western theme it also contains some comedy. With Shelley Winters and Telly Savalas offering up great lines too. Look for childhood friend of Lancaster's, and earlier trapeze partner, Nick Cravat, in the film as well. And Nick even has a speaking line or two in this one.

Made at a time of Hollywood anti-hero and comedic westerns, this movie holds enough realism and action to satisfy most western movie buffs. Even the Kiowa Indians look fairly real.

So whistle up your horse and ride out to help Burt recover those hard to recover furs, and just maybe Shelley as well!

Semper Fi.

4/5 A solid and enjoyable film.
  by flask
Sydney Pollack's "The Scalphunters" (1968) is a briskly-paced, revisionist Western with an entertaining script and equally entertaining performances by a strong cast. Given the title, some viewers may expect a serious and gritty drama about the depraved scalp hunters who plagued the American West. However, in actuality, this well-written light-hearted film is a clever blend of both comedic and dramatic elements.

The story is complicated, yet easy to follow: Joe Bass (Burt Lancaster) is a grizzled, Bible-reciting fur trapper with a monomaniacal attachment to his beaver pelts. Held up by Indians, Bass is forced to exchange his pelts for the tethered Joseph Lee (Ossie Davis), an escaped slave who formerly served an educated family in Louisiana. Bass and a reluctant Lee pursue the Indians but, through a twist of fate, Bass' furs fall into the hands of scalp hunters led by Jim Howie (the always engaging Telly Savalas), a burly ruffian henpecked by his prostitute-girlfriend Kate (a fussy, cigar-chewing Shelley Winters).

It is the latter performances which is the key to the film's success. Lancaster, Davis, Savalas and Winters effortlessly spin out humorous performances. And the best scenes are the humorous ones, such as when Savalas yells at Winters' to stop singing those damn Mormon songs or when Savalas defiantly tells Lancaster that he will kill him then steps on a cactus while returning to the wagon.

Yet for all its amusing tomfoolery, the film has a message: The axis of that message revolves around the dyadic relationship between trapper Joe Bass and the slave Joseph Lee; their hopes and their prejudices. Bass desires only to reacquire his pelts and Lee desires only to escape to Mexico. Both are reluctant to help the other. Each holds the other in contempt: Bass views Lee as a meek slave, and Lee views Bass as an uneducated hick. But, in the final scene, both characters are covered in mud; the color of their skin obscured. It is in this scene they find their equality, and one grasps the subtly of the film's psychology.