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SHADOW OF THE HAWK
Rating:  ½
USA. 1976.
Director – George McCowan, Screenplay – Norman Thaddeus Vane & Herbert J. Wright, Story – Norman Thaddeus Vane, Lynnette Cahill & Peter Jensen, Producer – John Kemeny, Photography – John Holbrook & Reginald Morris, Music – Robert McMullin, Special Effects – Dick Albion & John Thomas, Art Direction – Keith Pepper. Production Company – International Cinemedia Center/Rising Road.
Cast:
Jan-Michael Vincent (Mike Little Hawk), Chief Dan George (Old Man Hawk), Marilyn Hassett (Maureen), Marianne Jones (Dsonqua)
Plot: The aging Indian medicine man Old Man Hawk arrives in the city to request help of his grandson Mike, a successful business executive. Old Man Hawk is fighting a sorcerous war with the witch Dsonqua who was executed two hundred years before and is now seeking revenge. Mike, who has no interest in the Indian ways, is reluctantly drawn in to helping. Joined by a woman journalist, Mike agrees to drive his grandfather three hundred miles home. But along the way Dsonqua increases her efforts and summons magical forces to destroy them.
There is a potentially good film somewhere inside Shadow of the Hawk. The theme of the whitebread Indian rediscovering his heritage – one that was revived to some success in the 1990s in efforts like The Dark Wind (1991) and Thunderheart (1992) – is always a worthwhile one. And the plot sets itself up as a sort of variant on The Devil Rides Out (1968) using Indian mythology – it’s a plagiarism that seems to quite conscious even down to a climax featuring the hero inside a magic circle being tempted from outside by the forces of evil.
But Shadow of the Hawk really fails to ignite any of the ideas it touches on. George McCowan, who previously made the Nature’s Revenge film Frogs (1972) and would go onto the terrible sf film The Shape of Things to Come (1979), directs with an almost total disinterest in proceedings. And, although these occasionally rise to the interesting, Shadow of the Hawk is a film that seems to take place at far too removed a regard for one to care about one way or another. Chief Dan George offers a certain implacable dignity and at least Jan-Michael Vincent has found a part where his wooden impassiveness is quite appropriate to the role he is playing. Shadow of the Hawk could have been quite a good – The Manitou (1978) achieves some of what this tries for – but it is all too dully delivered to be much more than a failed curiosity.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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