Movie review: Santee
This is a Western movie that was released in 1973.
The lead role is a former sheriff who turned into a bounty hunter.
He find sand kills the members of a gang of bandits who are wanted dead or alive, and gets the reward from the sheriff.
The son of one of the outlaws, who witnesses his father’s killing, follows the bounty hunter to get revenge on his father's death.
Things don’t go as planned for the young man, and instead of getting revenge, he takes the place of the bounty hunter’s killed son, and becomes a member of the bounty hunter’s family.
One cannot escape destiny though, and the young man soon follows the fate of the bounty hunter’s real son, as he gets killed by the same gang who killed that son.
This movie is different from other Western films, where the son of a killed man usually takes revenge on his father’s death.
Here, this thing doesn’t happen.
Another thing to notice is that this movie doesn’t have a happy end, which would be the case, if the bad guys were all killed, and the young man managed to grow up living a peaceful life with his new family.
No matter how strong, capable, clever, and efficient the bounty hunter is at finding outlaws and taking them to justice or killing them, he doesn’t have the power to save the lives of his son, his sheriff friend, and the young man’s.
I think that this is the main lesson of the movie.
We can’t control everything in life, and when it comes to matters of life and death, there are sometimes powers beyond us that determine the course of events.
Sources and further reading:
Santee