Festival ’90 : Battling a Goliath : Movies: ‘Home on the Range’ looks at the conflict over who owns rights to tiny Kwajalein Island in the Pacific.

Almost everyone loves a David-and-Goliath story--including documentarian Adam Horowitz, who figured he would be filming one when he went to the Marshall Islands in 1986 to shoot a standoff between the U.S. Army and a 79-year-old native who claimed the military’s missile-testing base was illegally occupying his land.

Of course, when the Goliath in question is the American military, and David is an aged chieftain on a tiny Pacific island, it follows that--sentimental favoritism aside--one might want to hold off placing bets on the little guy.

Horowitz’s documentary, “Home on the Range,” does indeed turn out to be your basic man-fights-system, man-loses-against-system story, the kind of heroically downbeat true-life narrative on which liberal-leaning agitprop thrives.

“The film is pretty overtly political, I guess,” Horowitz said, almost resignedly, by phone from his Santa Fe, N. M. home. “That’s hard to get away from. From my own philosophical or political feelings, I was interested in the story. As far as any political messages, for me, it’s about imperialism; it’s about a military machine that’s out of control.

“But as a filmmaker, what interested me the most was this 72-year-old man single-handedly taking on the United States Army. It’s primarily the story of this man fighting for his rights and fighting for his family’s future. I think whatever political statements come out of it are really secondary to that. A good way to understand complex issues is by getting to know one individual’s experience, to try and put things in a perspective that people can understand.”

“Home on the Range”--which had its local premiere at the AFI International Film Festival this spring and was screened last month on KCET--will be shown Wednesday at Los Feliz Theater as part of the Los Angeles Festival.

The work, narrated in part by James Whitmore and Lou Diamond Phillips, takes a look at a conflict of interests in the Marshall Islands, home to an American defense testing base since World War II, and the site of a lagoon where missiles launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base land every week.

The area is also home to more than 10,000 natives, many of whom were displaced shortly after World War II when the Army leased land on the Kwajalein Atoll for a base and relocated residents to the tiny island of Ebeye, which Horowitz claims is now one of the most densely populated slum areas in the world.

An Army spokesperson, while declining to comment on the content of the film, pointed out that in the four years since the film was shot, living conditions on Ebeye have “improved considerably” with new housing, new roads and better public schools.

In 1986, the 50-year lease that the Army held on its Kwajalein land had expired, so chieftain Handel Dribo, the ostensible hero of Horowitz’s saga, decided to reclaim his spacious, uncrowded real estate--which by then featured a golf course, swimming pools and other American amenities foreign to the Ebeye way of life. With no new lease in place, the United States apparently had no real legal recourse at the time to kick Dribo and his fellow islanders off.

“They certainly had the manpower and the weapons to deal with an old man and his family, but I think they were in a really sticky legal situation,” Horowitz said, “because the lease had expired. And if they threw these people out without any legal basis, the whole thing could have gone to court and become a test case--and potentially they might have lost their $3-billion base.”

Horowitz, who practiced TV journalism in New Mexico but had never made a feature-length film before, recognized a good story in the making. “I had heard about this guy (Dribo) in the States and knew his story was worth telling, even without having met him,” said Horowitz, whose educational background is in anthropology. “I found out about the price the islanders were paying for this testing, and became sort of outraged myself. That’s when I decided to go over there.”

Horowitz says he was told by the Army he would not be allowed to film the “occupation,” which by then was two months under way. He hopped on a plane anyway and, calling from a pay phone in Hawaii, was finally granted permission to film on the Marshall Islands with the condition that he agree to later attend five briefings from five government agencies at the Pentagon to get the other side of the story. Ironically, Horowitz notes, he never was able to set up any of these briefings later on, despite repeated letters and phone calls to the Army.

Six months into the occupation, Horowitz got the inevitable ending for his film, which, of course, did not involve the U.S. Army’s loss of a $3-billion base. The bad news for Dribo came when the government of the Marshall Islands--which Horowitz calls a “puppet government” funded entirely by the United States--condemned all the land on which the base sits through eminent domain and gave the Army another 50-year lease at the same low rate, resulting in the removal of Marshallese by force.

Near the documentary’s end, more exasperated than enraged, Dribo--a very Westernized man who expresses admiration for John Wayne and other icons of American culture--has taken a not uncommon view toward the occupiers of “his” land: “I don’t understand the Americans,” he says, “because they seem to be the best people in the world, but they are also the worst.”

Filmmaker Horowitz claims not to understand the Americans either. He can’t understand why not only conventional missile systems but also new “Star Wars” experimental anti-ballistic missiles are still being tested in the Marshall Islands at such a high level. He can’t understand why U.S. foreign policy is allowed to run seemingly roughshod over native cultures.

“It’s very sad. Certainly no culture is preserved and remains unchanged, but I think what the United States has done to the Marshall Islands is a disgrace,” Horowitz said. “The situation at Kwajalein that’s been created by the U.S. Army has been 40 years in the making, and it’s a mess. Solving it is something the islanders themselves need to come to grips with. American policy needs to be (examined) . . . to give the islanders a better shake. I think Americans need to look at the effect we have when we go to other countries and exert our influence.”

Horowitz, 32, is now spending much of his time in Los Angeles, working to develop non-documentary feature-film projects, which also have similar global or environmental consciousness.

But he is proud of what he has done with “Home on the Range,” as for how it holds up as a good yarn as well as inspiring story of activism despite its downbeat denouement. “For me,” Horowitz said, “the most important thing is that it’s kind of a classic story of a man fighting the machine that I think people can relate to, whatever culture they’re from.”