Eagle’s Wing is this week’s Classic Tuesdays film at the National Gallery, Castellani House.
According to a press release, British director Anthony Harvey and an outstanding cast headed by Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston tell the story of a Comanche chief’s majestic white stallion, whose swiftness and strength lend him the name Eagle’s Wing.
In this unusual morality tale set in the late nineteenth century in the American West, Eagle’s Wing is pursued, stolen, then stolen again by determined men for whom this horse is more valuable than the chest of gold and brilliant gems that pass through their hands in their pursuit of this prized animal.
Martin Sheen plays Pike, a fur trapper waiting to trade with the Comanches along with Henry (Harvey Keitel in a cameo appearance). When the Comanches are attacked by the Kiowa tribe, Eagle’s Wing escapes with his dying chief, and a Kiowa brave, White Bull, (Waterston) is sent to capture it. Also attacking Pike’s camp and a funeral procession, White Bull remains to take the valuables of the rich widow (Stéphane Audran) returning home to bury her husband, the priest’s silver, and the priest’s sister, a young Irish girl, who is one of the widow’s servants.
When Pike by chance captures the horse at the burial site of the Comanche chief, a cat and mouse game begins between him and White Bull in the dramatic landscape of desert wastes and mountains, filmed on location in Durango, northern Mexico. The Comanches, seeking to avenge their chief’s death, and members of the widow’s household, riding to rescue her and avenge her attack, add further threads to the story.
Waterston, a well respected stage and film actor at this time long before his popular fame as District Attorney Jack McKoy in US TV’s ‘Law and Order’ series, plays the role of the Kiowa Indian with aplomb; Stéphane Audran, muse to French director Claude Chabrol and notably, Luis Bunuel, is the widow.
Award-winning British cinematographer Billy Williams (an Oscar winner for Gandhi in 1983), won a British Academy (BAFTA) Best Cinematography award for his work on this film.
The film starts at 6 pm and its running time is 1 hour 50 minutes.
