Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima epic, “Flags of Our Fathers,”
opens on Oct. 20. I rarely go to see movies in a theater (“Seabiscuit”
and “Master and Commander” are two that come to mind), but I’ll be
there for this one. Variety reviews it here. It’s inevitable that Ira Hayes,
the Pima Indian who was one of the flag raisers on Mt. Suribachi, would
be the focus of a movie about Iwo Jima. He’s been immortalized in the
1961 movie “The Outsider,” in which he was played by Tony Curtis, and in “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” written by by Indian folksinger Peter LaFarge but made famous by Johnny Cash:


There they battled up Iwo Jima’s hill,
Two hundred and fifty men
But only twenty-seven lived to walk back down again

And when the fight was over
And when Old Glory raised
Among the men who held it high
Was the Indian, Ira Hayes

Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won’t answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin’ Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war