The Scalphunters was the first of several films written by William Norton for the production team of Gardner-Levy-Laven. What the films have in common is the tweaking of genres, usually the western. Probably the best of their productions is The Mackenzie Break, a twist on on the World War II P.O.W. escape film, being about German soldiers in an American camp. The Scalphunters incorporates late Sixties zeitgeist in discussing racism and racial identity in the United States, as well as the notions of nature's bounty to be found in the desert's plant life. While Burt Lancaster's Joe Bass is not the enlightened hippie frontiersman of Robert Redford's Jeremiah Johnson, the similarities are easy to spot.

That The Scalphunters is more overtly political than other Gardner-Levy-Laven productions may also have to do with Burt Lancaster's control over the project. It would be interesting to know to what extent the film may have been re-written, and by whom. Lancaster was the one to choose Pollack to direct, and cast past collaborators Savalas and Winters. The Scalphunters was also consistent with the westerns Lancaster made in the Sixties and early Seventies that expressed his political beliefs. That The Scalphunters has several threads of authorship that can be discerned is in part the result of the collaborative nature of Hollywood filmmaking. In terms of Sydney Pollack's career, this may not be one of his better films, but in retrospect The Scalphunters yields clues about the types of characters and situations that would appear more clearly in future work.