Thank god there was room enough

Elvis Kills The Indians

So in this movie he’s the only half-breed, Kiowa with slick oil-black hair all poofed up in the signature of a century to come, his cowboy shirt collar standing up on his neck like a mortified cigar store Injun made of brokentreaty cloth and the cuss of life without zipperleather duds that might squeak when he jumped the horse that rode him off to shoot braves so dumb they posed for the sixgun shot that stunted them off their spraypainted ponies in crudely choreographed pratfalls that jostled the wigs off the palefaces playing them.

Who knew Elvis was such a part of the Old West lore, that his unslung guitar shaped the plains that drank the blood of the millions of redmen savages, the F-hole finale of the fretted tribes of a restless America so young and voracious, bronzed by the scalp of his audacity as the script pages turned, and the extras fell, and the cameras rolled, and the story raged on one dead Injun at a time, and thank God there was room enough in this vast territory of usurpance to swallow them all, so many, so very many their common faces rose up like geology in the canyons, red and wrinkled with the anonymity with which they were slaughtered, grand canyons, deep canyons, made not by rivers of water but from vessels of blood and all because Elvis got caught in a script he didn’t write, an editing session that jerked him around scene by scene until he didn’t know who to kill so he killed them all, red, pallid, brown, because this is what Westerns do, let loose their Waynes and Eastwoods, their Fords and Elvi on the world ‘cos if someone’s gotta die it had better be lots of Injuns, ‘cos no one cares about Injuns ‘cos they’re so fun to watch be killed in their comic dustbitten way, which is why it seemed there was a factory in Hollywood that made ‘em just for this purpose.

Joseph Gallo
September 18, 2005