"Running Brave," the first major film ever financed by Indians (Canada's Ermineskin Band), is meant to encourage young native Americans to take chances, to leave the secure but limited life of the reserve behind. But not before he tries to go back to his reservation, hoping to find what he's lost, the familiar insular culture. His prejudice and poor coaching techniques keep Mills emotionally hamstrung until Mills' wife Pat (Claudia Cron) helps him finally to overcome the negative image that has glued his shoes to the track.
It's a tremendous achievement for Hingle, who provides some of the film's best moments in his short- circuited relationship with the young Mills. Pat Hingle plays Easton, both vulnerable and ruthless at once. The last, by command of crusty Coach Bill Easton. With a scholarship to the University of Kansas, he encounters a new society made up of frat houses, napkins and running to win. But his promise as a runner pushes him into the thick of Midwestern civilization. When he stops, it's as though he's caught in a Lucite box, isolated as Indians are and were from the rest of the modern world. He's shining and sweating, alive and free, his identity in motion, the cadence of his footfalls like the thumping of the tomtom in Mike Post's fine score.
Benson, bronzed and lean, blue-eyed and remote, comes racing through the Dakota sun remarkably like Mills, so they say. After a mediocre college career, Mills broke free of the white man's rules and the Indians' reservations to win the 10,000-meter at Tokyo - one of the most exciting races ever run. "Running Brave," fleet and clean as an arrow in flight, stars Robby Benson as gold-medalist Billy Mills, the half-Sioux success story of the 1964 Olympics.
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