Killers of the Flower Moon: Martin Scorsese’s film is not the first to tell this story. – Slate

If you’ve seen Killers of the Flower Moon, you know this isn’t the first time this story has been told – the story of how William Hale and his nephew Ernest Burkhart amassed a fortune in the 1920s by suing Osage landowners of their oil wealth – it was told. The film ends with a recreation of a 1932 episode of the radio show “The Lucky Strike Hour,” which, at the behest of the FBI, dramatized the murders and their investigation by the FBI, including scenes suggested by J. Edgar Hoover himself . Tom White, the real-life agent in charge of the case, attempted to write his own account with the help of Osage author Fred Grove, and although that version was never published, Grove evoked the murders in several of his novels, including 2002’s “The Years” from Fear. Several other novels have been inspired by the crimes and David Grann’s bestselling non-fiction book, the basis for the new film, was published in 2017.

Martin Scorsese’s film isn’t even the first time the Osage murders have been shown on the big screen, but it’s strikingly different from his previous effort: 1959’s The FBI Story. Based on the book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Don Whitehead The film, which stars Jimmy Stewart as fictional agent Chip Hardesty, is as close to literal copaganda as you can get. Hoover sent two agents to the set to oversee production and had director Mervyn LeRoy reshoot scenes when he was unhappy with the FBI’s portrayal. Hoover even appeared as himself, as if to add his personal stamp of approval to the production. While Stewart’s narrator makes a handful of disparaging comments about the state of the FBI during the three decades spanned by the film’s episodic story, this only serves to illustrate how valiantly Hoover and his agents fought against the inadequate resources of the FBI’s early years and, implicitly, what productive use they are currently making of the public’s tax dollars.

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The Osage murders take up about 20 minutes of “The FBI Story’s” two-and-a-half hours, putting Stewart’s character in close proximity to several famous FBI victories, including the deaths of such colorful and notorious criminals as John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. The Osage Reign of Terror, as it is sometimes called, was just a minor step in the FBI’s success. By this time, Grann writes in Killers, “the Osage case faded from memory,” and the film shows little interest in any fidelity to the historical record. Grann says that when White heard that the film involved his investigation, he reached out to Hoover and offered to make himself available to the screenwriters. Hoover apparently abandoned this offer.

If you watch “The FBI Story” after “Killers of the Flower Moon,” some familiar names stand out: Bill and Rita Smith, who were blown up in their home in 1923; Henry Roan, shot the month before; and Roan’s cousin Mollie Kyle, the Osage woman who was married to Burkhart at the time of the murders. But other names are also conspicuous by their absence. Perhaps because they were still alive, William Hale and Ernest Burkhart are renamed Dwight McCutcheon and Albert Shaw. (Hale’s name remains, but only as the name of the fictional Oklahoma county where the murders take place.) Stewart’s character takes the place of Tom White, although White also deals with a nagging wife and a series of overactive children during his undercover investigation A cattle seller had to fight, grandma’s book doesn’t mention it. “The FBI Story” also invents the means of capturing the Hale character, which here involves rooms full of dedicated specialists comparing the handwriting of various documents. In real life, the evidence included statements from the doctor who cleared Roan for a life insurance policy that listed Hale as a beneficiary. The doctor recalled that when he asked Hale if he planned to “kill that Indian,” Hale laughed and replied, “Hell, yes.”

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Killers of the Flower Moon restructures Grann’s book to focus on Ernest and Mollie and make White a supporting player. The FBI story takes the opposite approach, placing Stewart’s character at the center in such a way that everyone else is pushed to the sidelines. There is not a moment in the depiction of the murders that is not either witnessed by, or at least narrated by, Chip. More time is devoted to his domestic disputes than to the Osage murder victims, individually and perhaps collectively.

Although the Hollywood practice of using white “red-faced” actors to portray Native characters existed until at least the 1970s, “The FBI Story” employs Native American actors to portray its Osage characters, including Eddie Little Sky as Henry Roan and Dorothy Skyeagle as Rita Smith. But their characters are silenced, both figuratively and literally. While William Hale’s deputy has a guilty conscience and initially poses as a concerned citizen before growling at Chip when he realizes he’s been caught, there isn’t a single line of dialogue between the Osage characters. When a white shopkeeper tries to sell Roan life insurance on the street, Roan just looks at him blankly and drives off. We next see him as a corpse, dangling from the passenger door of his car on a remote country road, with, as Chip adds in voiceover, “just a coyote blowing ‘faucets.'”

Even more striking is the way The FBI Story treats Mollie. Dwight McCutcheon’s troubled nephew’s wife is mentioned a few times, but she never appears on screen. She’s not even a character, just a detail that adds a little more color to the story, like Chip telling us what Bill and Rita Smith had for dinner the night they were murdered. Instead, we are introduced to the series of brutal murders through a depiction of the “silly side” of the situation, a collection of silly fictional Osages who are too simple to handle their sudden influx of wealth. There is one who buys three convertibles but doesn’t have the sense to put up the tops when it rains, another whose yard is littered with a dozen unused bathtubs, another who fills his house with telephones but has no one, who calls him. As far as “The FBI Story” is concerned, they are little more than children, naive and vulnerable guys who could never have saved themselves without the help of the FBI – regardless of the actual story.

The matter-of-fact depiction of the Osage’s death in “The FBI Story” contrasts sharply with the later scene in which Chip’s partner is shot by a fleeing criminal. The partner is given a dramatic story arc and a dying monologue, and his death also serves a dramatic purpose by highlighting the need for federal agents to carry firearms. The Osage are just corpses for the FBI to examine. Towards the end of The FBI Story’s brief account of the case, Chip rants to his wife about how the FBI relocated his family across the country. “The office has no right to send anyone here, with no churches and no schools and no decent food and no good doctors,” he shouts, ending by describing his surroundings as “a hellhole like this.” The fact that the Osage has long been He doesn’t seem to think that he will live in this hellhole after his death.