Unconventional in any era, Massacre is doubly so released in the mid-thirties, when the 'B' Western routinely slaughtered generic Indians. Richard Barthelmess plays a Wild West show Sioux at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair who, by his admission, wouldn't know a medicine man from a bootlegger. Such distinctions hardly matter when he can inspire sexual fantasies in city women ("I'll be that Indian's squaw any time"). His awakening comes on his return to the reservation to attend his dying father. Notwithstanding the evident cheapness of the production, with its back-projected landscapes, this Hollywood film astonishes by dissecting racism more than it embodies it. In a revealing comic parallel, Barthelmess' black servant (Clarence Muse) keeps miscalling the reservation the "plantation": "White folks didn't give the Indians much of a break. Sure is dry." This little-known film deserves bracketing with the best of Warner Bros. social-conscience melodramas. Less can be claimed for an anticipatory storyline in the late silent film Redskin (from which we'll excerpt two reels, one in two-color Technicolor). Another Indian finds entrée into the white world through physical prowess, this time (drawing from the life of Indian athlete Jim Thorpe) through collegiate track-and-field. In Redskin, the film spectator can take the separatist moral ("I'm going back to my people, where I belong") as either Native American pride or as a warning against miscegenation. The hero here is Richard Dix, as limited in his range as Barthelmess; it is as if, for Hollywood, inexpressiveness in a white actor signified Native American stoicism and inscrutability.