Budgeted for $800,000, Billy Jack made $32 million in domestic rentals from a gross of nearly $98 million. Not bad for a relatively small risk and it was a fact not lost on movie audiences or filmmakers alike who understood how the film's ham-handed influence would eventually sustain straight-to-video formula pics later on in the 1980s. But Billy Jack's box office figures also pointed out the value of counter-cultural themes and influences on the films of 1971.

Moreover the commercial success of Billy Jack helped coalesce the underground feelings of political alienation, troubled individual identity, lost cultural entitlement and the sense of changing personal responsibility in America. Along with such heroes of 1971 as Melvin Van Peebles's silent trickster in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Clint Eastwood's cop in Dirty Harry, the bitter men's club of Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel in Carnal Knowledge and the violent repression of Dustin Hoffman's bookish professor in Straw Dogs, male movie characters underwent an extraordinary crisis of identity. So too did Hollywood in opening itself to embrace previously untouchable topics like racial strife, sexual congress, urban decay, Vietnam and the generational conflict easily symbolized by the presidential mistakes of Watergate.

Gone were the days of white male dominance in the guise of a John Wayne, although conventionally celebrated heroes like Eastwood continued to find wide audience acceptance. Gone were the days of overt counter-cultural ridicule and the sense of unabridged silliness often associated with the youthful Baby Boom generation, although this generation would live to minimize and ridicule its own offspring in the course of time.

Instead what came to the fore of American capitalism and its varied artistic productions were conflicted notions about the state of the country itself. Related questions concerned the influence of race, sexual orientation, gender, class, legal status and age and theses identity politics were increasingly at the crosshairs of impacting society while also taking direction from society's more conventional values.

Along similar lines, and no longer contented either to make out-of-touch movies or to support such entertainment with hard-earned box office dollars, moviemakers and moviegoers alike were faced with a changed cultural landscape. The confrontation was never a clean one of recognizing one set of values and then adopting an alternative or replacement. Nor was the period without some sense of confusion about the future in the face of recognizing very real then-current troubles like the ERA, Vietnam, civil rights agitation, the Stonewall riots, hippie free love and the prospects of an information revolution.

Billy Jack stepped into this morass of political, cultural and aesthetic confusion and planted a flag of almost ridiculous amateurism and multi-cultural pandering that future generations would recognize as laughably bad. Still, its success prompted two sequels in The Trial of Billy Jack and Billy Jack Goes to Washington and made a momentary star of Tom Laughlin who was simultaneously the film's writer-producer-director-star. It also contained a memorable title sequence depicting the near slaughter of wild mustangs scored to the hit song "One Tin Soldier" by Coven.

Tagged with the phrase, "You've got due process, Mother's Day, supermarkets, the FBI, Medicare, air conditioning, AT&T, country clubs, Congress, a 2-car garage, state troopers, the Constitution, color television and democracy. They've got BILLY JACK," the eponymous hero is a Vietnam vet, Native American half-breed, killing machine and the guardian angel of a non-traditional school on the outskirts of a desert town. Oddly connected with Jean Roberts (Delores Taylor), the caretaker-administrator of the alternative school and Laughlin's real-life companion, Billy's also a thorn in the side of the town's right wing leadership, complete with its racist good old boy mentality.

When Barbara (Julie Webb), the daughter of one of the town's policemen, ends up in Jean's school as a runaway trying to learn the virtues of multi-cultural artistic creations, communal devotion and open-minded support for the differences between people, there comes a day of reckoning. Of course it helps matters along, if not for plot necessity than for the film's use of seemingly endless stereotypes, that the town is controlled by a single man named Martin (Stan Rice) who owns virtually everything and everyone, save for the peaceful people of Jean's school.

Martin's son Bernard (David Roya) takes particular umbrage with Billy's strength and influence and resolves to kill him as a way to impress his father. Along the way he complicates Barbara's life at the school, kills an Indian boy, rapes Jean to demonstrate his potency and ultimately gives Billy a reason to lay siege to Martin's minions.

In the end Billy kills Barbara's father and several of his cronies before barricading himself inside an old church with the runaway who volunteers to help him through the bitter end. Holding out overnight with a gunshot wound to the belly, he begins bleeding to death but manages to broker a peaceful end to his bloody war when Jean manages to extend the school's charter and arrange for Billy's surrender to their sympathetic ally and friend, Sheriff Cole (Clark Howat).

What any plot summary fails to explain, however, is how awfully bad whole sections of the movie are with its preachy, open-minded pre-politically correct political correctness. Still, there are some remarkable moments thrown into the mix that save this screwy and misdirected action-adventure story, making it a worthwhile relic from older times.

Among such clues to the museum-quality weirdness of Laughlin's picture is the listing of cast and crew credits using pen names that expand the apparent size of the production and conceal the credit due each contributor. To this end, it's unexpected and charming to find Howard Hesseman as one of the school's drama teachers enacting a number of funny improvisational scenes that lighten the load of fear and loathing as Billy Jack's apparent lot in life.

Then there's the occasionally spot-on observation about race relations, peaceful intentions gone awry or romantic love such as the evolution of Barbara's character from being a promiscuous girl into recognizing the connection she shares with other members of the school community. Of course it must be underlined how idealistic and potentially revolutionary the school itself is as a bastion of free expression, hard work and mutual support. But it's every bit of virtue also makes it unnerving, strange and alienating instead of being the model for social experience it seems intended to be.

That Billy Jack frequently undercuts these potentially subversive ideas with martial arts, violence, gunplay and old-fashioned vengeance is exactly what's so confusing about Laughlin and his movie. While being a relatively benign physical presence, he's a wooden actor of the highest order. Line deliveries everywhere are pathetically bad, camera work is seemingly random and story elements play second fiddle to more spectacular scenes of townie vs. school conflicts or odd cutaways locating Billy within the Native American community from which he hails.

Points are earned for trying to be something more than the lower half of a double-bill yet Billy Jack is most appealing along its fraying edges. When the school's students and teachers engage the town council and challenge their ideas about a good education and appropriate social behavior, the sequence lies outside the scope of the movie's underlying revenge fantasy but it's precisely in such an odd moment that Billy Jack finds its heart.

Unfortunately, for a movie hero promoted as being, "Just a person who protects children and other living things," Billy Jack is a cipher for other ideas. No more a person than the horse or motorcycle he rides, he's instead a symbol for the changing face of movie masculinity both encouraged by this picture and commented on through it.

It's a clumsier, less polished and not nearly as convincing film drama when compared to the 1971 Academy Award-winning picture The French Connection. Even so, Billy Jack was responding to the very same cultural impulses giving flight to Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle and the kinds of vigilante mentality playing just beneath the surface of the film showcasing his person.

Callous, unrefined but with a superior code of moral conduct and an ends justify the means sense of social justice, Billy is also brutal, occasionally violent and a loner with odd connections to the margins of society that he tries to protect, sometimes regardless of cost. In this capacity for self-sacrifice and aspiration for a better world he's admirable inasmuch as he's an outlier to the predominant political system. Naturally it's this same quality of existing outside the mainstream that makes him an endearing, dangerous and more than a little bit captivating despite what actually appears on-screen.

To celebrate Billy Jack without mentioning its failures is a mistake. To likewise ignore its attempt to forge a new kind of film outside the Hollywood studio system is also to risk missing the point. The least that can be said about Laughlin's film is that it plucked the harp strings of its moment and this harmonious recognition is what makes it memorable, though troubled, in the very same vibration.