Paul Newman is a white guy who was raised by Apaches until some other white guy found him and brought him to live with other white people. He wasn’t a big fan of white people, so he moved back with the Apaches. White people hated him, they wouldn’t even ride in the coach with him. That is, until bandits came and they needed him to save their sorry asses. He has a chip on his shoulder, and gloriously, the moral of the story was not that he needed to lose it, but that he should have had it all along.
The movie was a far more successful than The Searchers as an engagement of how ugly and stupid racism is. It just would have been nice if this engagement of racism toward Native Americans could have had some characters who were, you know, Native Americans.
