Josha’s Exploitation Station: Tom Laughlin

By Josha Petronis-Akins

A-Movie: The Born Losers

Years ago, I watched a documentary about Australian exploitation cinema called Not

Quite Hollywood. The movie is now a happy blur, and I didn’t bother to watch it again

for this article. One fragment which I can still remember involves an appearance by

Quinten Tarantino. Basically, he said that when he watches a movie, he wants to be

shocked. He wants to not be able to believe what he’s watching.

I thought of this when I saw The Born Losers. This low-budget bikersploitation

picture killed at the box office not once but twice: in 1967 when it was a sleeper hit,

and again in 1974 after its auteur Tom Laughlin had become famous and infamous

around the world. I choose to write about it not just because it’s the

less-remembered original appearance of Tom Laughlin’s awesome Billy Jack

character, but because I think it’s an untouchable classic.

Tom Laughlin was the writer, director, and star of most of his movies. Although he

worked mainly without involvement from major studios, he managed to both bring in

huge audiences and influence movies which were actually considered respectable

by critics. He was a renaissance man: a high school and college football star who

married a cheerleader, an author of books on Jungian psychology, a practitioner of

martial arts, a self-taught filmmaker, a born-again flower child, and the founder of a

Montessori school.
I haven’t nearly seen all of his movies yet, but it seems like he incorporated all these

interests into them at every chance he got. He also liked to address any and every

“ripped from the headlines” social issue, not just for cheap exploitation, but because

he wanted you to know his own opinions. In 1960, a 29-year-old Laughlin wrote and

directed his first movie, called The Young Sinner. In it he starred as a high school (!)

football champion expelled after being caught in bed with his girlfriend. The movie

wasn’t actually released until 1965, so it failed to break him out of an unremarkable

1950s acting career, whose highlights were a small role in South Pacific and a

leading role in an exploitation youth gang movie called The Delinquents. He followed

his obscure teen sex film with an obscure college sex film, called The Proper Time.

Laughlin’s real breakout success, and what I assume is his best movie, was a

violent, low-budget outlaw biker movie called The Born Losers. I won’t discuss its

plot very much because I don’t want to spoil it, and because I don’t know what The

Active Page will be comfortable printing. Instead, I’m going to focus on the main

character: Billy Jack.

Billy Jack is one of the greatest heroes in cinema, inspiration to Steve McQueen’s

acting career, basis for the original First Blood novel, and by extension the original

Rambo. This character is an expression of Tom Laughlin’s values and ego, and so

he can only be played by Tom Laughlin, who masterfully sells every aspect of the

character, except for one. Billy Jack is a Native American ex-special forces Vietnam

veteran who hates war and wants nothing more than peace. He lives zenned out in a

trailer in the woods, at one with nature. The people of the town below shun him

because he’s Native American. He doesn’t want any trouble, but when he sees the

weak being oppressed, he can’t stop himself from stepping in. He rides a motorcycle

(and in the sequel, a stallion), wears an iconic denim outfit, and is trained in Hapkido.
He’s a ruthless killer, but can also be a gentle, fatherly figure to someone who needs

it. He loves animals and keeps his money under a mattress because he doesn’t trust

banks.

Laughlin actually invented a version of the Billy Jack character as early as 1953 with

the specific intention of raising awareness of the plight of Native Americans. He tried

continuously to get some kind of movie involving the character greenlit, and was only

able to do so more than a decade later, after he quickly wrote a script which

exploited the trend of outlaw biker films.

Almost the whole time I watched The Born Losers, my jaw was on the floor. The

movie was so shocking that I had to spend a couple of days processing it before I

could properly sit down to write this review. Once I had finished digesting the most

outrageous moments (including a hilarious-in-the-sense-of-Mommie-Dearest

mother-daughter scene which reminds me of Rebel Without a Cause), I had to

contemplate the film’s paradoxes: it’s lurid, yet compassionate; exploitative, yet

sincere. In fact, the overwhelming sincerity mixed with tastelessness is probably

what makes Tom Laughlin movies so special.

The elephant in the room, so to speak, is the fact that Tom Laughlin was white. It’s

not mere trivia that his Billy Jack character is Native American: it’s an important part

of the plot. Throughout The Born Losers, he’s racially abused by many of the film’s

characters, and his racial identity becomes even more important in the sequel. It also

becomes more distracting when we see him beside actors who are actually Native

American. I do want to insist that Tom Laughlin was coming from the best possible

place in deciding to play a Native American character, and I’m sure it never occurred

to him that he could be offending anybody.

B-Movie: Billy Jack

“On this reservation, I am the law!” says a still lily-white Tom Laughlin to the corrupt

sheriff in Billy Jack, the better-known sequel to The Born Losers. To my bafflement,

many people consider this movie to be an improvement on the original: I guess it’s at

least more original and ambitious, although it doesn’t come together nearly as well. A

few years after the events of the first movie, Billy has returned to his Lakota

reservation, which is now host to a hippie commune called The Freedom School.

He’s taken it upon himself to protect the gentle hippies from the evil sheriff and his

impudent rapist son. Meanwhile, he prepares for a shamanic initiation. The central

theme is whether violence and vigilantism can be justified in the cause of peace and

equality. Roger Ebert, characteristically missing the point, said that the film’s

conclusion is “fascist.” I say it’s tragic, nuanced, and anything but.

Tom Laughlin has a real talent for filming Spaghetti Western type posing and scenes

of tension and violence. It’s a shame then that Billy Jack is so indulgently focused on

showing off the flower child artwork and musicianship of Tom Laughlin’s friends and

family through the vehicle of The Freedom School. The first half of Billy Jack is very

slow, but I recommend it for its dated charm, amazing performance from Tom

Laughlin, and its genuinely provocative take on ethics.

There are more movies in the Billy Jack series, and I haven’t seen them yet. Maybe

I’ll cover them in a future issue of The Active Page.

If you have an idea for a movie for me to review, send me an email at

joshapetronisakins@gmail.com