Billy Jack (1971)

I first became aware of Billy Jack as a favorite movie of the characters Lorelei and Rory Gilmore on the television show Gilmore Girls. I had the film marked out as something to see and about a year ago recorded it on my DVDR when it was shown during a preview of the channel EPIX Drive-In, which is a channel I kind of wish I hard permanently. Anyway it wasn't until just the other week that I finally watched it, not knowing until after I did so that the films star and director Tom Laughlin had just passed away on December 12th.

Laughlin had had a mildly successful career as an actor in the 1950's with highlights including appearances in the movies South Pacific and Gidget as well as the television show Climax! By 1961 Laughlin had completely left Hollywood to work full time in a Montessori pre-school he and his wife actress Delores Taylor had founded in 1959 in Santa Monica. In the mid-60's Laughlin started making plans to get back into film again and that eventually took the form of the 1967 film The Born Losers, featuring Tom as a character he had created for himself, Billy Jack, a half-Indian Vietnam War vet turned vigilante, basically the source material for Rambo. Anyway The Born Losers (which I have not seen) proved pretty popular with the public, popular enough to spur the making of Billy Jack and two other sequels (which I have also not seen.) Having now watched Billy Jack , I must confess that I now want to see the whole quadrilogy.

Billy Jack has the title character living in either southwestern California or Arizona and helping out a Montessori type school run by Laughlin's real-life wife Delores. The school is persecuted by local toughs, especially after they take in the abused and pregnant daughter of a sheriffs deputy who is also a right hand man to the corrupt local political boss. There's actually a suprising amount of characters and plot to this film, so I won't get into things in detail save to say that Billy Jack can only be pushed so far when the people he loves are wronged. The film is quite engaging, you never quite know where its going, and is thusly full of a lot of unexpectedly things, which are generally done very well. I totally understand how this would become a cult movie. Not for everybody, including older Gilmores, but a pretty dang original piece of film making. ***