Graham Greene

In Dances with Wolves (1990), Graham Greene gives Kicking Bird the quiet authority of someone who does not need to keep asserting it. His dry humour matters just as much: it allows a person to emerge from a potentially solemn part. We warmed to the film because Greene made us interested in Kicking Bird himself, not just in what Dunbar might learn from him. Alongside Rodney A. Grant’s Wind In His Hair, he helps make the Sioux community a gathering of distinct people. That is a substantial part of why Kevin Costner’s patient Western works.

It is also where the limits of the writing become clear. The script sometimes makes Sioux life too reassuring, and Dunbar’s education remains the central concern. Greene’s performance softens that problem without solving it; he gives Kicking Bird individuality, but the character still has to serve somebody else’s story. Mary McDonnell’s emotional directness as Stands With A Fist helps, too, though the performances cannot supply all the complications the script leaves out.

Kicking Bird was his international breakthrough, but the roles that followed often required him to be stoic or mystical again. He resisted that narrowing of his work. As Joe Lambert, an NYPD detective in Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), he also worked outside Indigenous casting. We recommend that film for Willis and Jackson’s friction, despite its untidy plotting and tiring last act, rather than as a Greene centrepiece. It belongs in an account of his work without being the place to start appreciating him.

The tribal police roles of Walter Crow Horse in Thunderheart (1992) and Ben in Wind River (2017) show how persistently authority shaped his casting. There is nothing wrong with returning to that kind of part, provided the character gets something individual to do. The wry humour of Maverick (1994) deserves space beside those roles when considering what he offered. Start with Dances with Wolves, then try Maverick for the comic actor whom the solemn casting could obscure.