The same characters that keep reappearing, bigger than life, find their own integrity in doing what they do the way they do it, even if it causes their own deaths.

Nevertheless his humanism is thematically evident in The Longest Yard (1974) about the rigged-game politics and Ulzana's Raid (1972) about the post–Civil War violence against Native (and not only Native) Americans. Army careerism determined who attacked and who ordered the attack.