The Billy Jack series, produced over the course of two decades, was a labor of love for Tom Laughlin and his wife Delores Taylor. This picture fell right in the middle of the series, with two movies before it (The Born Losers, 1967, and Billy Jack, 1971) and two after (Billy Jack Goes to Washington, 1977, and the uncompleted The Return of Billy Jack, 1986).

The credits for this picture would lead one to believe this was a family affair. Laughlin and Taylor's daughter Teresa is in the cast, and their 19-year-old son Frank is credited as the director, but it is generally acknowledged that this was just a pseudonym for Tom Laughlin. On the two previous films in the series and the one to follow this, the elder Laughlin used the name T.C. Frank for directing credit. Only the final (unfinished) film of the series bears his real name in references, most likely because its lack of a theatrical release forestalled the use of a pseudonym.

This third installment offered more of the same from the critically drubbed but commercially winning previous picture, with loner do-gooder Billy Jack once again wreaking vengeance on the evil forces of authority and white privilege. Taylor returns as the director of the Freedom School, a leftist utopian training ground for "yoga sports" and muckraking journalism. After four years in prison (because of his actions in the previous film) and following a vision quest, Billy Jack comes to the defense of the school and its neighboring Native American village when the intolerant townsfolk threaten and abuse them. The pre-credits opening sequence citing statistics about anti-student and anti-activist violence in America point to the plot as a likely response to the Kent State shootings of 1970.

Laughlin and Taylor, who wrote the screenplay as "Frank and Teresa Christina," obviously had the best liberal intentions, but the stories they are couched in drew strong criticism from critics. Vincent Canby in the New York Times described this film as "part pageant, part kung fu action film, part Western, part earnest civics lesson, part Show Boat melodrama, part recollection of the various horrors of the late 1960 and early 1970s"; and The New Yorker's Pauline Kael pegged it as a "big Pentecostal tub-thumping show [that] brings together the worst of mass culture and the worst of the counter-culture." Writing in New York magazine, Judith Crist said that despite the leftist underpinnings, the reaction from audiences felt more appropriate to a screening of Leni Riefenstahl's glorification of Nazism, Triumph of the Will (1935). Crist claimed a fight broke out during the screening she attended when one audience member pummeled another who dared to chuckle during the over-the-top finale featuring the cast singing "Give Peace a Chance."

Laughlin and Taylor's John and Yoko pretensions may have aroused considerable snark from reviewers, especially since the solution offered to intolerance in this series tends to be anything but peaceful, but the picture did healthy business. It came in as 1974's third highest-grossing release with $89 million, behind Mel Brooks' #1 Blazing Saddles and the disaster flick The Towering Inferno and just ahead of Brooks' Young Frankenstein and the disaster flick Earthquake.

The cast included a number of Native Americans, including Sacheen Littlefeather, famous as the actress who in 1973 stood in for Marlon Brando at the Academy Awards ceremony, refusing his statue for The Godfather (1972) as a protest for Hollywood's depiction of Native Americans. Most of these actors contributed their own words and thoughts to the unscripted Indian Rights symposium in the film.

Also in the cast is William Wellman Jr., son of the veteran Hollywood director (A Star Is Born, 1937; Story of G.I. Joe, 1945). Wellman Jr. appeared in four of the five Billy Jack pictures as well as Laughlin's directorial debut, Like Father, Like Son (1961). The two likely met as actors in Wellman Sr.'s war film Lafayette Escadrille (1958).

The Trial of Billy Jack was filmed on location in Arizona, New Mexico and the iconic Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border, familiar from a number of John Ford Westerns.

This episode in the saga of Billy Jack has a place in movie history as the first film to be launched in the wide release method frequently used today. It debuted in more than 1,000 theaters, which were booked by the producers (Laughlin and Taylor, natch, again eschewing on-screen credit) as a "four-waller," meaning they rented the theater and kept control of ticket receipts.

It also has the distinction of being included by authors Harry and Michael Medved and Randy Dreyfuss in their 1978 book The 50 Worst Films of All Time. It was in good company, however, with D.W. Griffith's Abraham Lincoln (1930), Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944), Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970).

Director: Frank Laughlin (Tom Laughlin)
Producers: Tom Laughlin and Delores Taylor (uncredited), Joe Cramer
Screenplay: Frank Christina, Teresa Christina (Tom Laughlin, Delores Taylor)
Cinematography: Jack A. Marta
Editing: Michael Economou, George Grenville, Michael Karr, Jules Nayfack, Tom Rolf
Art Direction: George W. Troast
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Cast: Tom Laughlin (Billy Jack), Delores Taylor (Jean Roberts), Victor Izay (Doc), Teresa Laughlin (Carol), Lynn Baker (Lynn), Geo Anne Sosa (Joanne)

By Rob Nixon