"The youth of this country have only two heroes, Ralph Nader and Billy Jack."
--Tom Laughlin, filmmaker, actor, and paragon of modest self-assessment.
Like every other kid in the 1970s, I saw Billy Jack (1969-1971... Later rereleased in 1973) and was impressed. I managed to avoid the reviled sequels (though I'm told that The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) grossed more, at the time,* than either Godfather II or Young Frankenstein, before it vanished from the culture). I also was aware that the character first appeared in an exploitation flick, Born Losers (1967), though I never saw it.
I finally watched it, and this led me to take another look at Billy Jack, which I had not seen since the 70s.
Born Losers revisits the plot of The Wild One (1953) from the town's point of view, with Billy thrown in to deal with the thugs. Billy Jack desperately wants to be a message film. Unable to decide upon one timely message, they toss in all of them.
The Billy Jack of Born Losers is basically a likeable local tough guy, a biracial ex-Green Beret who just wants to be left alone. He changes his attitude when an evil motorcycle gang invades town and causes trouble for everyone. Only gradually, and with the aid of some sympathetic cops, does he make any headway.
In Billy Jack he's movie-mythic, essentially a superhero. His character lives.... somewhere... and protects the local Rez, the wild horses, and a free school run by Carol, played by Laughlin's wife, Delores Taylor. They'll let any kid in, including runaways, so long as they carry their weight and avoid drugs.
Both films share much with the 70s series Kung-Fu, including the trope of a mixed-race hero played by an obvious Caucasian, whom white racists immediately slam with the appropriate racist slurs, despite his complete lack of anything that would indicate that ethnic heritage. The second film replaces Laughlin's standard cowboy hat with what would become his trademark Navajo hat, what sources online identify as a Natani Nez hat, so he has some kind of ethnic signifier. The villains of the first film have no idea who he is at first, but they identify him as an "Indian," usually using more offensive words. Pretty much everyone knows Billy in the second film.
Odd sidenote: one of the town racists in Billy Jack calls a First Nations character, one of the students, a "greaseball." As a person of Mediterranean ancesty, I take great offense to that. That racist slur is reserved to insult my group. If you want to be an effective racist, please consult with the group that you wish to abuse regarding the appropriate slurs. To really get good at it, practice these while standing, unarmed, surrounded by angry members of that group.
They won't take offense. Trust me.
To continue:
Both movies overuse rape as a plot device. Yes, violent men tend to use sexual assault as a weapon, especially against girls and women. Its use in these films becomes excessive and exploitive. It becomes even more problematic when virtually every nude scene involves sexual assault or abuse.
Also, according to Billy Jack, the appropriate response to attempted sexual assault is to make the would-be assailant drive his Corvette into a river. Or I suppose not, since that just means he returns later, more determined.
Both films lean anti-Establishment, though both feature at least one decent cop who respects and assists Billy. He and the town share common cause in the first film. In the second, most of the townsfolk mistrust him, but some come over to his side.
Each film has some unexpected casting. Born Losers somehow convinced Holllywood legend Jane Russell. Her glory days now behind her, she plays a small but significant role.
Billy Jack features the future Dr. Johnny Fever.
Billy gets sidelined for much of the second movie by improvised scenes involving the kids at the school that he is protecting. Actually, that's among the things that I remembered the most about the movie. Some of those scenes hold up, in a slice-of-the-times sort of way. During the rewatch, I was surprised to realize that Howard Hesseman plays one of the teachers (billed under the name "Don Sturdy"). Hesseman actually had genuine credentials in the counterculture and in guerilla theatre, so Johnny Fever has some history of which I had been unaware.
Actual kids play the kids in Billy Jack, which always impresses me. They have authenticity, and most of them are better actors than much of the cast of Born Losers.
Alas, this generally positive aspect turns really uncomfortable in the scene where one of the villains, Bernard, is caught with a thirteen-year-old prostitute. The scene features brief but full nudity. I suspect that, in this case, the unidentified actress is probably not a minor (I doubt she's thirteen, certainly), but I could not say that for certain and, in the 70s, that is not a given. Shades of the whole groupie culture of the 60s/70s, Jeffrey "Yes, we're still talking about him" Epstein, and, well, actually, the entire history of sex trafficking. In short, making her thirteen-- whatever the performer's actual age-- is on-point, but seriously disquieting, particularly given the number of teens and children involved in this movie.
Billy, of course, has an adult love interest.
Our hero develops a relationship with a young woman in the first film, and they leave together. She vanishes in all subsequent films, replaced by Carol. We must assume that something happened between the two movies.
Born Losers identifies Billy Jack as an indigenous person. He consequently faces some racist attitudes. However, his background isn't much more relevant.
Billy Jack gives great weight to his background.
The credits indicate consulation with actual First Nations groups, but that applies only to a couple of early scenes at the school. We see, for example, a Paiute Friendship Dance, performed by members of the Paiute Nation.
The rest of the "Indian" rituals involve an invented culture with visual elements of both Plains and Navajo groups (as best as I can determine), and a lot of Tom Laughlin and Karl Jung. Billy Jack, garbed like the messianic figure Laughlin is now playing, engages in an invented ritual involving a poisonous snake.
The Billy of Born Loser is a fighter, but Laughlin had little martial arts training at that point. He trained intensively in Hapkido between the films, and his teacher, Bong-soo Han, acted as consultant and stunt double in the martial arts-heavy Billy Jack.
Which brings us to the film's violence.
Everyone has discussed the contradiction between Billy Jack's pro-peace messaging and the titular character's violence. The film never really resolves the tension between the two. I can only say that it discusses that tension, and the paradoxical pairing proved a major reason for the film's success.
Billy Jack is not great cinema, and Born Losers is pure period drive-in exploitation. However, the character became a hero to numerous young people, and the second film remains worth seeing, at least for its better moments.
And then there's the rabbit hole I did not expect.
The theme song to Billy Jack, "One Tin Soldier," was everywhere for a spell. Even my mom learned to play it. It actually was first released, separate of the movie, in 1969, by the Canadian group, Original Caste. Other covers followed. The film version was performed by one Jinx Dawson, the singer for a group called Coven.
Coven was an early adopter of the occult trappings later popularized by heavy metal, and the kind of onstage theatrics better known through later adaptors such as Alice Cooper. They also allegedly introduced the "sign of the horns" to pop culture. At the very least, they did it before any other musical artist who has made the claim. Their first and most successful album features a song called "Black Sabbath" and their bassist was named "Oz Osborne." Shortly after this album came out, the nascent British band "Earth" changed their name to "Black Sabbath" and their lead singer, one John Michael Osbourne, adopted the stage named "Ozzy Osbourne." Yeah, that guy, RIP.
The members of Sabbath have always claimed it's all a coincidence. Coven later took heat and their album was pulled by many distributors because a widely-read article on the Manson Family murders referenced them as an example of dangerous occult overtones within the counterculture. Now effectively linked to Manson, they limped along and disbanded. Perhaps they can take some solace in their occult role in pop music, and in presaging the entire 1980s Satanic Panic debacle.
Okay, perhaps not.
Jinx formed a new Coven in the early twenty-first century.
Tom Laughlin died in 2013.
*Other sequels: Billy Jack Goes to Washington, a remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, barely saw release of any kind. Laughlin began filming The Return of Billy Jack in the mid-1980s. That film was never completed.