Perhaps not a great movie, this is still one of Richard Harris's mightiest box-office successes. He's in prime form as the English aristocrat who falls into the clutches of a tribe of Sioux Indians. Fascinated by his fair skin and blond hair, they take him prisoner and proceed to inflict terrible torture by ritual (turn your eyes away at the 'Sun Vow' scene where our hero is suspended by horsehair ropes from bones inserted into holes made in his chest by eagle claws), before they will accept him. Obviously, this and other scenes make this far more brutal than Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves. But it remains a fascinating, if slightly gauche, variation on the 'man living wild' theme, bluntly addressing both anthropological differences and the inevitable contempt that ignorance of different cultures engenders.

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