Striking out on a journey-quest not unlike that of the contemporary Indians of 1989’s “Powwow Highway,” Cree documentarian Neil Diamond sets out in his rambling film “Reel Injun” to locate the true heart of America’s indigenous people in the sideshow babble of Hollywood history.

Charting a course in his rickety “rez car” from his Canadian home near the Arctic Circle to Los Angeles, Diamond constructs a loose travelogue that seeks to examine the evolution Hollywood’s depiction of American Indians in the movies over the past century plus (from Thomas Edison’s earliest Kinetoscope image of Indian dancers onward).

“Reel Injun,” told with no shortage of world-weary irony, makes stops along the way at several iconic locations that figure strongly in the shifting stereotypes that moviemakers have used to depict Native Americans. Those include the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Crow Agency in Montana, Little Big Horn, the Navajo Nation and Utah’s Monument Valley (where so many John Ford-John Wayne shoot-‘em-ups were staged).

Along the way, Diamond identifies various roles that Indian characters have been assigned in movies to fit cultural (read that: white) expectations.

In the silent era, it was the “noble native.” During the Depression came the “brutal savage,” usually vanquished by stalwart Westerners such as John Wayne. In the age of civil rights, we saw the emergence of the “dead Injun,” whose extermination was an emblem of social injustice. And later came the appearance of the “groovy wise man,” a rebellious proto-hippie figure in touch with nature and personified in films such as “Billy Jack.”

Meanwhile, Diamond notes the paradox of juicy Indian roles in films going to white actors such as Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, Burt Reynolds and Elvis Presley, and the supreme irony of iconic Indian figure Iron Eyes Cody (of the “Keep America Beautiful” ad campaign) being of Sicilian heritage.

Along the way, Diamond inserts various talking-head signposts in interviews with outspoken activists and actors such as Russell Means and John Trudell and notes some significant cultural events (the occupation of Wounded Knee, Marlon Brando’s sending Sacheen Littlefeather to turn down his best-acting Oscar) that have fueled the distorted media mythologizing of native peoples.

And Diamond aptly wraps up his journey by acknowledging a new generation of young Indian actors (Graham Greene, Adam Beach, Gary Farmer, etc.) and moviemakers telling stories in their own, inimitable voices in films such as Chris Eyre’s “Smoke Signals” and Zacharias Kunik’s “Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.”

While “Reel Injun” perhaps meanders too much to be a definitive study on the subject, it achieves in the bemused, ironic voice of its maker a bittersweet honesty and an entertaining point of view that focuses much-needed attention on Hollywood’s long-held confusion over what it is to be a real Indian.

- Dennis King

As you eagerly await kickoff on Super Bowl Sunday, why not sate your pigskin lust with your own video football film festival?

Football movies are a burgeoning subgenre of sports films that offers fans literally scores of fine action- and inspiration-filled possibilities – ranging from macho favorites such as “Semi-Tough,” “Necessary Roughness,” “Any Given Sunday” and “The Longest Yard” to weepy tales such as “Rudy,” “Radio,” “Brian’s Song” and last year’s “The Blind Side.”
Some mainstream, female-friendly films are obvious: “Heaven Can Wait,” “Jerry Maguire” and “Wildcats.” And some are just for half-pint halfbacks: “Air Bud: Golden Receiver,” “Angels In the Endzone,” “Little Giants” and “Lucas.”

Here is a baker’s half-dozen to fuel your football jones until game time:

“Possums” (1998) – Singer-actor Mac Davis stars in this made-in-Oklahoma (Nowata) comedy about a small-town radio announcer who ignites community spirit by broadcasting imaginary games in a march-to-championship season after his local high school cancels its perennially losing football program. It’s a down-home football fairy tale.

“Horse Feathers” (1932) – In this riotous send-up of college gridiron shenanigans, Quincy Adams Wagstaff (Groucho Marx), the new president of Huxley College, hires bumbling ringers Baravelli and Pinky (Marx brothers Chico and Harpo) to power his school to a big gridiron win against archrival Darwin U. Brace yourself for an hilarious football finale.

“Knute Rockne All-American” (1940) – Future prez Ronald Reagan practically stole the movie from the titular Notre Dame coach (Pat O’Brien) in his small role as the strep-infected player George Gipp. But O’Brien reclaimed the spotlight by reciting Gipp’s deathbed request to his dispirited team: “…the last thing he said to me, ‘Rock,’ he said, ‘sometime when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper.’”

“The Waterboy” (1998) – This is one is for all the perpetual benchwarmers. Adam Sandler’s knucklehead comedy sports some lowdown jock jokes and monstrous hits as it tells the tale of dimwitted, bayou mama’s boy Bobby Bouchet, who goes from being harassed waterboy to star “foos-ball” player when he reveals an uncanny ability to lay low hulking opponents with his bone-crunching tackles. Truly, a steroid-fueled revenge of the nerds.

“Paper Lion” (1968) – That literary quintessence of sports wannabes, preppy man-of-letters George Plimpton, lived out fantasy stints sparring with the pros in tennis, baseball, golf, boxing, ice hockey and, of course, football and then writing about it in glossy magazines and books. His fumble-bum turn with the Detroit Lions was adapted into a clever movie with a patrician Alan Alda portraying Plimpton and showing his effete Ivy League ways withering under the brutish pressures of the Lions’ locker room.

“Jim Thorpe: All-American” (1951) – A robust Burt Lancaster stars in this Hollywoodized version of the Oklahoma sport legend’s triumphant and tragic life. Though it’s filled with many hackneyed movie devises, unfortunate clichés about race and sports and several cringe-inducing patronizations of American Indian life, the movie still has the power to inspire and give testament to Thorpe’s amazing prowess as an all-round athlete and his incredible gridiron career at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Olympic competition and in stints in professional baseball, football and basketball.

“MASH” (1970) – Sure it’s technically a sly, dark anti-war satire on Vietnam masquerading as a Korean War comedy, but the last half-hour of Robert Altman’s classic features some of the funniest, most anarchic and irreverent football footage ever committed to film. The chaotic
game between the 4077th MASH medicos and the goons of Gen. Hammond’s rival unit included a game-ending, ball-under-the-jersey trick play and a cameo appearance by Steelers-Raiders-Chiefs star Fred “The Hammer” Williamson as a MASH ringer. Most subversive of all is a quick, late-game shot of Colts’ legend Johnny Unitas furtively toking a marijuana joint. It was, after all, counterculture football.

- Dennis King

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – It might sound a little precious to say so, but Bill Forsyth is in the best sense a “boutique” filmmaker.

This singular Scottish writer-director has only nine modestly budgeted movies on his resume, and each of them is a unique gem – lovingly crafted, keenly intelligent and invested with an idiosyncratic, handmade quality that renders it wholly novel.

Although he hasn’t released a film in more than a decade, Forsyth still attracts a loyal following of fans who share his earthy, eccentric take on life and continue to admire his originality in movies such as “Gregory’s Girl,” “Local Hero” and “Housekeeping.”

It’s those three films that will be featured in a two-part “special event” beginning this week at New York’s fabulous Film Forum.

On Thursday, a spanking new 35mm print of “Housekeeping,” Forsyth’s 1987 adaptation of the Marilynne Robinson novel, will be screened at the Greenwich Village theater, followed by an appearance by Forsyth himself in an interview with James Healy, assistant curator of the George Eastman House of Rochester, N.Y.

The next Thursday, April 22, will feature showings of Forsyth’s quirky 1981 coming-of-age comedy “Gregory’s Girl” and his 1983 small-village masterpiece “Local Hero.” Naturally, it would take a heroic effort for Oklahoma fans of Forsyth to attend these events, but all of the director’s films are readily available on DVD. So the occasion provides an opportune time to revisit these or other of his remarkable works.

“Housekeeping,” Forsyth’s first American film, is set in the Pacific Northwest of the 1950s. In it, orphaned Sara Walker and Andrea Burchill are “rescued” by a relative they’ve never met – Christine Lahti’s Aunt Sylvie, whose kookie lifestyle proves not nearly as charming as it seems on first blush. Michael Wilmington of the Los Angeles Times wrote of the movie, “Forsyth – though his palette here is grayer and cloudier than in any of his earlier films – keeps his sense of wonder. The sadness of ‘Housekeeping’ is twisted into its bemusement and reverie, its oddball charm. It’s a lovely, strange little film – quietly, tensely lovely ….”

“Gregory’s Girl”: Desperate after an 8-game losing streak, a Glasgow school soccer team recruits a hotshot female player; and although demoted to goalie, teenage knucklehead Gordon John Sinclair falls hard for her. But there are behind-the-scenes feminine conspiracies at work here. “The movie contains so much wisdom about being alive and teenaged and vulnerable that maybe it would even be painful for a teenager to see it,” wrote Roger Ebert.

“Local Hero”: Off to buy up the picturesque Scottish coastal village of Furness for a refinery, Texan Peter Riegert finds himself falling in love with the place, even as astronomy-loving boss Burt Lancaster arrives via helicopter to seal the deal. But crusty beachcomber Fulton Mackay has an intriguing counterproposal. “Genuine fairy tales are rare; so is filmmaking that is thoroughly original in an unobtrusive way. Forsyth’s quirky disarming film is both …,” wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times.

The writer-director’s full resume includes these films: “That Sinking Feeling” (1980), “Gregory’s Girl” (1981), “Andrina” (1981), “Local Hero” (1983), “Comfort and Joy’ (1984), “Housekeeping” (1987), “Breaking In” (1989), “Being Human” (1993) and “Gregory’s Two Girls” (1999).

Forsyth, 63, both wrote and directed eight of the films on his resume and has received numerous awards for his work, including BAFTA film awards for “Gregory’s Girl” and “Local Hero.” The only film he directed but didn’t write was 1989’s “Breaking In,” which was penned by the estimable John Sayles and featured Burt Reynolds delivering one of the finest, most understated performances of his career in the role of an aging, over-the-hill professional thief.

One of Forsyth’s best but least appreciated pictures came in 1984 with “Comfort and Joy,” a whimsical yet slightly melancholy tale about a Scottish radio DJ in mid-life crisis who inadvertently becomes embroiled in a feud between two rowdy Italian clans vying for control of the Glasgow ice cream market.

New Yorker film critic David Denby once speculated on the director’s unique perspective: “A director with a comic vision of his own – a way of seeing the world that is funny or odd down to its roots – comes along perhaps once in a decade. Bill Forsyth, the young Scottish writer-director, may be one of those talents.”

And Forsyth himself has said of his off-kilter take on comedy, “Perhaps naively I thought people understand what humor was, that it was invented by the human race to cope with the dark areas of life, problems and terrors.”

Although he’s been absent from filmmaking since the lukewarm critical reception and sparse distribution of “Gregory’s Two Girls” in 2000, Forsyth revealed in a BBC Radio interview last year that he’s currently working on a new film project with the working title “Exile.”

More information on the Film Forum’s special tribute to Bill Forsyth can be found on the theater’s website, www.filmforum.com.