User Reviews

Journey Through Rosebud is a film sadly neglected through the years. I missed in theaters when it first came out and I finally did get to catch it on YouTube. It's an interesting story of a man for whom leadership and greatness seem to be calling. Only Robert Forster is failing to heed the call.

Watching it I was put in mind of the Ronald Colman film The Masquerader about a titled M.P. who fails to seize the reins of leadership in the House Of Commons, so dissipated is he with drink and drugs. That's Forster, Vietnam veteran pride of his tribe, but who's so beaten down with bad habits he can't function. Forster's character is also reminiscent of Ira Hayes and how Tony Curtis portrayed him in The Outsider. Remarkably similar themes.

It's an outsider who unwittingly sets in motion the forces for Forster's destruction. Young Kristoffer Tabori comes on the reservation with nothing more than an idea to escape the draft, something that was on the minds of many young men of 1972. He gets involved with the Sioux and their cause, but he's an outsider.

To Victoria Racimo, Tabori represents something different even if he's a white kid from California. When Tabori steals her from Forster it's the end for him because he realizes his dissipation and how he's let people down who count on him.

Some good scenes of reservation life are included in Journey Through Rosebud. It holds up well because over 40 years later the same problems are still there.

I just watched this one on YouTube and I will say that it's a very well dramatized film about the realities of rez life on the Rosebud. Almost immediately Frank has a run-in with the damned BIA agent who told him he "couldn't hunt out of season". Natives have been here since time immemorial therefore they have been doing things THEIR way long before the whites came. They have already been hunting, fishing, trapping etc. whenever THEY needed to, NOT when any foreign entity tells them to!

It was a good thing that mob showed up with their guns and demanded they release that man from the station otherwise there would have been some serious trouble. I liked Danny throughout the film since he was a really good kid who never gave the People a hard time with anything, except right at the end there after he slept with the girl. Frank suspected there was something going down between the two so he took off and ended up committing suicide. That was how enraged he was with the girl. As a result, Danny walked into the community hall only to find the people were glaring at him with such disdain on how they thought he only slept with her to tell Frank that she was now Danny's. A real twist of fate in this film as any good film will have. It's just a shame that Danny ended up leaving because him and Frank were really good friends. Anyway, this one deserves a 9 out of 10.

In half the runtime this has everything that Dances With Wolves expresses about the allure of Indian life for a liberal white man AND raises far more serious critical questions about the motivation of such a character and why his hopes of integration are liable to remain at the level of dreams. AND it works well as a documentary-style insight into modern (early 70s) Indian life, with appropriately understated but not at all wooden performances by the 3 leads (Kristoffer Tabori as the young draft dodger Danny, Robert Forster as the charismatic but anguished Frank who takes him under his wing, and. Victoria Racimo as Frank's estranged wife, Shirley).

The film I watched before this one, Joe Kidd, from the same year, is glossy nonsense that's so badly written it doesn't even work well as the escapist drama it's trying to be. By contrast, Journey Through Rosebud, directed by Tom Gries, who showed he knew what he was doing with Will Penny, is thoughtful, moving adult drama. Joe Kidd has 20,000 ratings; Journey Through Rosebud has 63. That makes me sadder than the ending of this film...