The Sedona International Film Festival is proud to partner with the Sedona Historical Society to celebrate the National Day of the Cowboy with a screening of “Stay Away, Joe” on Saturday, July 22, at 3 p.m. at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre.
This is the society’s annual screening of a vintage Western film made in Sedona. “Stay Away, Joe” was the last star-driven, major feature film to be shot primarily in Sedona.
After 1967, Sedona was mostly reduced to making cameo appearances in movies.
The afternoon of Sedona movie history will begin at 3 p.m. with a panel discussion about the film itself, stories about Elvis Presley and his “Memphis Mafia” in Sedona and a critique of the negative depictions of American Indians in the film, which were panned, even in contemporary reviews.
Tickets are available now at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre box office or online at sedonafilmfestival.com/event/stay-away-joe. Proceeds benefit the Sedona Historical Society and Sedona Heritage Museum.
Promoted with the tagline “Elvis goes West … and the West goes wild,” the film was untended as a departure from Presley’s usual musical movies.
Presley was cast with three Oscar nominees — Burgess Meredith, Mexican actress Katy Jurado and Joan Blondell — on the assumption that it would elevate his stature as a serious actor.
The film features musical interludes by Elvis, who was so embarrassed by one of the songs “Dominick (the Impotent Bull)” that he refused to allow the studio to release it as a single.
“Stay Away, Joe,” a Western comedy, follows the misadventures of Joe Lightcloud [Presley], a half-Navajo rancher, as he embarks on an effort to raise cattle on the Navajo Nation. Joe persuades his congressman to give him 20 heifers and a prize bull so that he and his father can prove that the Navajos can successfully raise cattle on the reservation. If successful, the government will help all the Navajo.
The plan goes sideways when the bull is accidentally butchered and barbecued by Joe’s friend Bronc Hoverty [L.Q. Jones], while Joe sells the heifers to buy home improvements for his stepmother Annie Lightcloud [Jurado] and Joe must find a new bull to make the venture work.
Sedona’s beautiful red rocks are a feature of the film, with stunning aerial footage of rock formations running under the opening credits and visible in many of the scenes. Event attendees will enjoy picking out familiar formations and figuring out where each scene was filmed.
A modern Western farcical comedy, the film was not well received by critics due to its stereotypical depiction of American Indians just as the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was raising awareness of the treatment of minorities, especially American Indians living on reservations.
Reviewer Kevin Thomas wrote in The Los Angeles Times wrote that “[‘Stay Away, Joe’] could scarcely seem more embarrassingly tasteless or ill-timed than right now. In an unintentionally patronizing way it projects an image of the Indian as happy-go-lucky, immoral and irresponsible just when the public is becoming aware of how truly tragic his plight is. No amount of good-naturedness — and ‘Stay Away, Joe!’ undeniably has plenty of that — can compensate for humor based on stereotypes so offensive to minority-group sensitivities.”
The Sedona Historical Society operates the Sedona Heritage Museum located in Jordan Historical Park, 735 Jordan Road in Uptown. It is open daily from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Call (928) 282-7038 or visit sedonamuseum.org for more information.
According Chapter 4 “Elvis as Indian in Film and Life” by Michael Snyder, in the 2012 book “American Indians and Popular Culture,” edited by Elizabeth Hoffman: “‘After 1960, Elvis Presley could have continued to engage his Cherokee heritage positively as he had in Flaming Star, building it into a sustained vein of his work, but this potential was squandered to some degree with his next Indian film. This was the embarrassing debacle of the 1968 Western comedy Stay Away, Joe, in which Presley plays a reckless young Navajo bronco-buster and veteran, Big Joe Lightcloud. He had high expectations for the movie, telling a reporter that it would provide him with ‘a more grown up character,’ a role he could perform in a sophisticated mode, mentioning Paul Newman’s Hud and Michael Caine’s Alfie as reference points, Guralnick wrote.
“Instead, Presley found himself sitting in a cow pasture, obliged to sing a jaunty waltz to a bull, urging the recalcitrant Dominic to become a stud like himself. According to Guralnick, Presley lamented to an RCA Records vice president, ‘God, Harry, I don’t want to record this,’ and begged him, ‘if I die, promise me they won’t put this out.’ (For more on the Native American Renaissance, see Chapter 1 in Volume 2.) The film was actually the first Elvis Presley movie not to be accompanied by a soundtrack EP or LP, although it includes a tasty bluesrocker, ‘All I Needed Was the Rain,’ which was collected in one of many cash-in albums, Elvis Sings Flaming Star, years after the film was released.
“Directed by Peter Tewksbury—who was better known for TV comedies such as My Three Sons—Stay Away, Joe was based on non-Native Montana author Dan Cushman’s 1952 novel, which had been made into a successful 1958 Broadway musical called Whoop-Up. Cushman’s comic novel was a book-of-the-month selection and was generally well reviewed. Cushman grew up near the Rocky Boy Reservation, and his novel, set in Montana and not Arizona, is entertaining if problematic and shallow. In the book and movie, Big Joe could be called ‘shiftless,’ spending all his money won at rodeos on women, booze, and cars, and liking nothing better than a brawl. Presley envisioned him rather as ‘a wheeler-dealer who’s always promoting something.’ Joe’s grandfather is pleased by a scalp that Joe claims to have taken from a communist. In the novel, the war is Korea, and although Vietnam is never mentioned, Joe would be a Vietnam vet during the time frame of the film. Today the novel seems dated and saturated with stereotypes; yet, as Nazareth points out, the book and the film militate against stoic Indian stereotypes by featuring a lot of Indian laughter.
“Moreover, Peter Beidler wrote in 1978 in Studies in American Indian Literature that the novel is of historical interest for depicting Native characters in varying relationships to tradition and modernity, and also because it was a cult favorite among American Indian readers from 1953 through at least the 1970s. In an essay for Arizona Quarterly, Beidler claims that ‘Stay Away, Joe has been amazingly popular among American Indian readers.’ Writing prior to the publication of almost all of the literature that would come to form the Native American Renaissance, Vine Deloria Jr. in Custer Died for Your Sins acclaims the novel as one of three books that ‘give a good idea of the intangible sense of reality that pervades the Indian people.’ Deloria actually calls Cushman’s novel ‘the favorite of Indian people’ and claims that it ‘gives a humorous but accurate idea of the problems caused by the intersection of two ways of life.’ The Montana Blackfeet and Gros Ventre author James Welch diverged wildly with Deloria’s assessment, however. Welch vetoed an excerpt of Stay Away, Joe from inclusion in an anthology of Montana writing, The Last Best Place, according to the New York Times obituary of Cushman.
“Given the former Native readership and Deloria’s praise, there was some potential for a redemptive movie, but for an adaptation of this 1953 book to work in turbulent 1968, much updating would be necessary. The film, however, has no sense of the political changes afoot or the growth of Native activism. And even though Joe is a communist-scalping veteran, the word ‘Vietnam’ is never uttered. Upon its release in April 1968, the New York Times lamented that the movie ‘could scarcely seem more embarrassingly tasteless or ill-timed than right now.’ Stay Away Joe was not redeemed by a top-notch cast including Joan Blondell and Burgess Meredith as Joe’s father, who hovers in between traditional Indian and white culture.
“The problem was, no one involved, except Elvis Presley, actually cared about making a good movie about American Indians. Meredith’s accent fails to sound remotely Navajo, and he mugs and cavorts as though he were still playing the Penguin on the set of Batman. Like others involved with the film, Meredith refused to take it seriously and saw it as a cash cow, prioritizing involvement with the theater instead.
“‘The reason I took the role was to get financial backing to do the Chayefsky play,’ he admitted to journalist Digby Diehl.
“The movie plays the novel as farce, full of 1960s go-go party scenes and mountains of empty beer bottles. Douglas Brode highlights the irony: ‘Every negative stereotype is included, particularly those Flaming Star effectively helped diminish.’ The movie squanders an opportunity to engage with the contemporary, increasingly politicized Native America, which also would have appealed to the late sixties’ youth counterculture, who was becoming increasingly fascinated with all things tribal.
“According to the Elvis Encyclopedia, one redeeming feature was that the movie reportedly provided work for as many as 140 American Indians who were hired as extras for the party scenes.“
