The Daughter of Dawn (1920)

As our nation’s original “others,” Native Americans were a screen on which white settlers and their descendants projected their fantasies, if not their sense of guilt — particularly at the movies. Mainly in westerns, indigenous Americans were alternately nature’s noblemen and creatures of untrammeled id, stand-ins for Chinese communists and the third world’s oppressed masses.

Perhaps because they were produced in the first few decades after the closing of the frontier and the end of the centuries-long Indian wars, a number of films made in the 1910s and early 1920s took a nostalgic view of Native American culture. Some features, like F. E. Moore’s “Hiawatha” (1913), Edward S. Curtis’s recently restored “In the Land of the Head Hunters” (1914) and Rollin S. Dixon’s “History of the American Indian” (1915), even aspired to self-portraiture in featuring largely Native American casts.

“The Daughter of Dawn,” a 1920 feature only recently recovered from the limbo of lost films and now on disc from Milestone, is one of these; it was made in the Wichita Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma the same year as a small cluster of sympathetic films that included “Before the White Man Came”; three Prizma Color documentaries (“The Land of the Great Spirit,” “Life in the Blackfoot Country” and “The Heritage of the Red Man”); and a public health educational film shot on the Arapaho reservation in Wyoming, “Nurse Among the Tepees.”

Written and directed by Norbert Myles, a former vaudeville actor, “The Daughter of Dawn” was publicly screened once in Los Angeles and a year later in Topeka, Kan., then vanished. Around the turn of the 21st century, a complete nitrate print mysteriously surfaced as a form of payment given to a North Carolina private detective; ascertaining the rarity of the material, he sold the print to the Oklahoma Historical Society, which supervised its restoration.

“The Daughter of Dawn” was shot in black and white, with a frequent use of a golden tint — perhaps meant to suggest a timeless Golden Age — that reinforces its status as buried historical treasure. Supposedly based on a Comanche legend, the movie concerns the competition between two Kiowa warriors for the affections of the chief’s daughter, Dawn. In part, their contest involves hurling oneself off a cliff — an act of heedless bravado reminiscent of the game of chicken in “Rebel Without a Cause.” The loser is exiled, precipitating a short war between the Kiowas and Comanches before the requisite happy ending.

Plot is secondary to the movie’s documentary aspects. The cast includes two children of the celebrated Comanche chief Quanah Parker, himself the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, the white settler’s child who, kidnapped by Comanches, grew up in and became part of the tribe. (Her story was an inspiration for the novel adapted as the film “The Searchers.”) In a sense, “The Daughter of Dawn” is a living diorama. The performers seem more positioned than directed, and the movie’s fascination for a contemporary viewer derives from their self-presentation.

The same cannot be said for “The Return of a Man Called Horse,” the lavish 1976 sequel to the 1970 hit “A Man Called Horse,” reissued on Blu-ray by Olive Films. As with many Hollywood westerns, the Indians are largely played by Mexican actors, with the Hollywood veteran Gale Sondergaard as the tribe’s female elder, a role taken by Judith Anderson in the first “Horse” adventure.

Directed by Irvin Kershner, this film begins more or less where “The Daughter of Dawn” ends — with one tribe attacking another’s idyllic village. It is, however, far more violent and far less straightforward. Where “The Daughter of Dawn” interprets Native American culture according to the precepts of 19th-century American melodrama, “The Return” simultaneously embodies the white supremacist attitudes of early 20th-century pulp fiction (“Tarzan” springs to mind) and, a particularly graphic buffalo slaughter notwithstanding, the countercultural romanticism of the 1960s.

Richard Harris in “The Return of A Man Called Horse.” Credit Olive Films
Less a sequel to “A Man Called Horse” than a 70-millimeter remake, again with subtitles to translate much of the Native American dialogue, “The Return” transports the British aristocrat Lord John Morgan (Richard Harris) back to the Yellow Hand Sioux tribe that captured him in the first movie. Once more (and at greater length), he undergoes the grueling, gruesome skin-piercing initiation rite referred to as the Sun Vow, and, thus repurified, again leads his adoptive people to victory.

Reviews were not kind when “The Return” opened 40 summers ago. While acknowledging the film’s visual grandeur (well served by the Blu-ray transfer), Vincent Canby of The New York Times found it “more unpleasantly patronizing than uplifting,” while, in The New Yorker, Penelope Gilliatt joked, with reference to the Sun Vow, that the movie should be called “The Return of Tell Me When I Can Look.” It may have been Ms. Gilliatt’s negative comments that prompted her colleague Pauline Kael to re-review the movie when she had the opportunity.

Ms. Kael praised “The Return” as “the first Hollywood epic in which the rituals of the Indians make sense.” She also saw it as reviving the optimistic attitude that she believed characterized the western genre and was presumably dampened by the tumult of the 1960s. In “The Return,” she wrote, “the surge of elation comes from the spiritual rebirth of an Indian tribe.” In a way, the movie was a hippie fairy tale.

George Lucas appears to have been another fan. It was on the basis of “The Return” that he enlisted Mr. Kershner (his instructor and mentor at the University of Southern California) to direct the second, more mystical and darker installment of the “Star Wars” saga, “The Empire Strikes Back” — or at least that’s the legend.