Disillusioned half-Indian Green Beret Vietnam veteran Billy Jack comes back home to Arizona and what does he find? Several people illegally hunting on Indian land. And to make matters worse, one of them is the local sheriff, so the law no longer applies, and Billy decides that he must take it into his own hands. Not that the sheriff really matters-the real boss of the town is the local millionaire and his spoiled bully son.

But there’s more. There’s a set of hippies near the town who have set up a Freedom School on the same Indian land (with permission), and occasionally they go into town to do street theater and other antics. The locals dislike them and the local rednecks harass them, and as pacifists they cannot fight back on principle. So Billy Jack comes as the great cowboy hero, punching out the local rednecks whenever they cause the hippies trouble.

Things get worse when one redneck rapes one of the hippies. She tries to hide it from Billy Jack, knowing what he will do, but he finds out anyway, and despite the hippies’ insistence, he shoots the rapist dead, and holes up in a church, ready to die fighting. But a lawman with better integrity comes up and Billy Jack surrenders to the law, the hippies raising their fists in a power salute as he is taken away.

I was a tyke when this film was made, so I don’t remember the era, but those who have do, and they laughed at the suspiciously clean hippies and the idea they were just harmless goofs who were unjustly bullied. Real-life hippies were neither clean nor harmless, and the dislike for them not so unjustified. “Billy Jack” is a period piece, but doesn’t show the era as it really was.