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At the denouement of one of my favourite old films — ‘Hombre’ — a thoroughly bad man who has been thwarted in an attempt to steal a lot of money, which had in turn been stolen from Indians on a reservation by an even worse man, is facing an Apache Indian who had been adopted by a white man but returned to the Indians, and who has no use for white men's ways. He has been led, much against his inclinations, to attempt to save the wife of the man who starved the Indians. She is just as bad as her husband and is being held hostage by the men who want to steal the money. What has led Hombre to do it is the altruism of a good woman. If she—a client state, as it were — will risk her life for an unworthy woman, he will risk his. It is his code. As Hombre (Paul Newman) bluffs Richard Boone, and as his bluff is called, and as they square off for certain mutual destruction and as the back-up system fails because the hostage is in the line of fire, Richard Boone says, with a perfect amalgam of world-weariness and sheer delicious anticipation, ‘Well now, what do you suppose hell is going to look like?’ Both die. Hombre: machismo, able to see through white folks’ cant, but noble, a reluctant brave at the service of damsels in distress, knowing that he will almost certainly die. Doing right.
The women—one utterly corrupt and opportunistic but elegant, staying with the only man she has; the other, shop-worn (her former lover was the sheriff, who went bad and is now one of the robbers), but standing for decency and insisting on helping another human being, however undeserving.
The usurpacious Indian agent—who sold the meat intended for the people on the reservation in order to line his own pockets and ensure a comfortable retirement for himself and his stoical wife.
The thoroughly evil man, as cynical on behalf of evil as Hombre is on behalf of self-sufficiency, and ready to die for his greed. We have here a Manichean world-view of pure, perfectly split, good and evil.
Two bad, two good