By Steve Vertlieb: Forgotten with the inevitable passage of time, as well as the entirely justified praise for Martin Scorsese’s epic masterpiece, Killers of the Flower Moon, is the fact that the tragic true story of the wholesale slaughter of Osage Indians from 1921 to 1926 in Osage County, Oklahoma was documented nearly sixty-five years earlier in another American motion picture.

I was just thirteen years old when I first saw The FBI Story at The Benner Theater in Philadelphia upon its initial release in 1959 but I was so moved by, and thrilled at, the heroic exploits of Jimmy Stewart and Murray Hamilton as courageous young FBI agents in director Mervyn Leroy’s Warner Bros. production that five years later, at the tender age of eighteen, I wrote a letter to Mr. Hoover expressing my somewhat naive, impressionable admiration for the Director and for his historic agency, then known simply as The Bureau of Investigation. 

Having seen Martin Scorsese’s epic masterpiece, Killers of the Flower Moon in theaters, featuring brilliant performances by Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Lily Gladstone, in a profoundly heartbreaking performance as Molly Burkhart, I was reminded of the FBI’s investigation into the heinous murdering of Osage Indians at the time, and its first screen remembrance in that earlier film, while recalling my own personal interaction with its controversial director.

While there is no question whatsoever that this newest adaptation of the grizzly events occurring in the American Midwest during the 1920s is a brilliantly realized cinematic creation, conceived by the cultured genius of one of this country’s most acclaimed film directors, it must also be remembered that the story was told once before by yet another legendary film director as a chapter in an earlier historical epic, The FBI Story, created for the screen by director Mervyn Leroy, with a stirring musical score by legendary composer, Max Steiner, and a supporting “cast of thousands.”