Abraham Polonsky, featured director in PFA's recent Hollywood and the Cold War series, made his directorial comeback after 20-odd years of blacklisting with this 1969 feature for which he also wrote the screenplay. On the film's release, Variety's reviewer felt that Willie Boy “may be one of the great U.S. films, and surely the most radical in its vision.” Time magazine called it “an intense document of racial persecution that stands as one of the finest films of the year.” Convincing the studio of the desirability of Polonsky as director of such a film was no easy task; however Pierre Rissient's re-introduction of the 1948 Force of Evil in Paris to rave reviews aided Polonsky's case here.
The story is based on a real incident in which a Paiute Indian named Willie shot the father of his girlfriend and the two were forced to go into hiding in the Mohave Desert--forced not by Indian custom but by a white community looking for an anti-cause cèlébre and a scapegoat. Robert Blake as Willie and Robert Redford as the deputy sheriff who tracks him down turn in excellent performances in a film that concentrates less on character than on its very modern treatment of an uncompromising message. (Variety noted, “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here is fully as complex as any film by Antonioni, Bergman or Bresson... It will need heavy and enthusiastic comprehension and support by critics...”).
Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here is only the second film Polonsky directed; he wrote numerous scripts under pseudonyms during the blacklist period, which extended for him much longer than for many others. For him, the film sums up his years of loneliness. “Hell,” he says (in Time), “this isn't a movie about Indians. It's about me.”