The Percy Harris Story

Brian Lutes never ceases to amaze us! Some time ago we’ve had the opportunity to see ‘Ming… Voice of Deception’, a heartbreaking story of a World War I veteran returning home and having great problems taking his old life back. Then his other film, ‘Prisoners of Time’, which is another great war-related movie, focuses on the PTSD disorder that can slowly kill you if you don’t treat it correspondingly. Today we have the chance to review another project of Brian Lutes named ‘The Percy Harris Story’. Will it rise to the level of our expectations? Let’s see.

It is interesting to see how Brian Lutes’ movie universe is based somewhere in the past, and it’s always set in a period of war, depression, slavery, and lack of equal rights. Lutes uses the harsh aspects of life to make art out of them, and this is something rare in this day and age when many of the film directors out there don’t choose subjects dealing especially with the American Civil War because of the racism and sexism issues it portrays. One thing that can be easily seen in any of Lutes’ films is the raw, powerful and natural acting routine. In ‘The Percy Harris Story’ there are some scenes that are hard to digest by sensitive people, one example being the one at the beginning, where four people are brutally killed, or the one where Percy is dragged on the ground by a horse, or even the one with the fish hunting – all of these scenes are brutal and extremely dramatic, but at the same time, they give this film the right amount of magic and realism.

Brian Lutes the actor does an impressive job here. There are some scenes where he goes over the normal threshold of pain a human being can experience, and we cannot hold ourselves in comparing him with Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘The Revenant’. As Leo does in the Oscar-winning film, Lutes struggles to get back to a normal life. Both of them are constantly wounded, they deal with bad guys and Mother Nature, which sometimes is even worse than the bad guys (as seen in both movies). Both of the characters get their revenge in some way, in the end making the whole story run a natural novelistic course. We’ve said it before, and we will say it again, Brian Lutes has a great talent for writing stories. We hope ‘The Percy Harris Story’ will become, in fact, a novel in all words for the reason that it deserves to be like that. Whoever watches ‘The Percy Harris Story’ will relate, and it’s hard to imagine someone who did not think already of publishing such a shocking and complex story.