Hollywood Studio Magazine (June 1971)

STEPPE FATHER - Jack Palance is Omai Sharif’s old, tired and jealous father in the upcoming Columbia picture, “The Horsemen,” a John Frankenheimer - Edward Lewis production also starring Leigh Taylor-Young. Filmed on the steppes of primitive Afghanistan, “The Horsemen” centers about that country’s national sport, bushkazi, the world’s most dangerous game. Jack Palance- Buzkashi Horseman Jack Palance would neither confirm nor deny the story that has followed him about the world, ever since “Shane.” He would far rather talk about his role in Columbia Pictures’ upcoming “The Horsemen,’’ the John Frankenheimer-Edward Lewis production also starring Omar Sharif and Leigh Taylor-Young. Palance plays Sharif’s father in the film, a 60-year-old Afghanistan horseman from the northern steppes close to the Soviet border. His body is bent, his eyes and face wrinkled, his hands gnarled. His throat is leathery from the rasping ululation of buzkashi, the world’s most violent sport at which he once was a master. “A good role is a good role,” Palance says, “and I wanted this one.” To play the part, Palance worked on location in 1000-year-old Afghanistan. It took something over two hours each morning to perfect his make-up; the dawn usually found a quartet of top Italian make-up artists working simultaneously on Palance’s face, arms and feet. He wore a weighted belt inside his costume to make him walk like an ancient, and practiced for days to accustom himself to the awkward high-heel boots the Afghanistan buzkashi players wear. Buzkashi is a game played on horseback by the Afghanistanis. “It is,” says Palance, “the wildest thing I have ever seen. It’s incredible that these men would ride at each other the way they do - they whip, they hit, they cut, they carry knives and they can slash at each other. This they’ve cut out just recently ... the knife bit. A horse going at full gallop - another horseman would reach over and cut the reins. The horses go down, or are killed outright. The men take horrible falls. They run into the audience on their horses. They don’t give a damn about anything that happens.” The game is played on a large field, sometimes miles-long. The body of a decapitated calf, stuffed with sand and weighing about 125 pounds, must be carried by a horseman from a circle to the side of the field and then dropped back in the circle. “There are six players on each side, and sometimes as many as five sides will play, so that you have 30 players. Each one is an individual and playing for himself, however. He wants to win alone. Sometimes the game will go on for hours because the moment a man picks the thing, up, somebody else is grabbing at him, hitting him, taking it away. And then they take it from him, so they rarely get any place. They just maul about, and hit and whip each other.” When Genghis Khan introduced the game, the buzkashi players used the living bodies of prisoners. In “The Horsemen,” Sharif is probably the greatest buzkashi player around, as Palance once was. And the film deals in part with the father’s jealousy of the son. “I don’t think there’s anything he wants to relive through his son,” Palance explains. “The problem is, he wants to live. He doesn’t want the son to win and become as great as he was. It begins the film - an old man getting out of bed, and why does he want to get out? He doesn’t want to. He just knows he has to get up, he has to face the world again, and it becomes an extremely tedious thing to do, to have to face the world again.” There are scenes of Palance on horseback, as the old man remembers his youth and his triumphs, and the manner in which he battered his way through those who dared oppose him in the rough-riding world of buzkashi. And that brings it back to Palance and “Shane.” Fresh from Broadway, Palance achieved international film fame as the deliberate, slow-moving menace of “Shane.” The pains with which he mounted or dismounted from his horse, or eased his way along the street, evoked a new type of screen menace. The fact is, until “Shane,” Palance had hardly ever seen a horse, no less ridden one. Two days of continuous practice riding the animal, before “Shane” filming began, had made him so saddlesbre he could not have moved faster even if he had wanted to. Now, he’s truly one of “The Horsemen” of Afghanistan, and the world. * * * 8