Lionel Newman and Joe DeRita help Gregory Peck make this a classic

morrisonhimself

"Classic" is truly an accurate term for this strong script and powerful story presented by superlative actors and director and accompanied by one of the most dramatic and memorable scores of filmdom.

"The Bravados" has stuck in my mind since the first time I saw it, as a child, primarily for the score by Lionel Newman. His work here is one of the very best non-Elmer Bernstein scores. (Here is a sampler of Bernstein's music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6__oixvAak.)

Gregory Peck is a given. To my knowledge, he never gave a bad performance, and, in fact, I can't even think of a bad movie he was in.

Probably "cowboy" is not the first characterization one thinks of in connection to Mr. Peck, but he was a good one when he essayed a western role.

Another actor, this time one in a role completely different from any other, is Joe DeRita, mostly known, of course, as "Curly Joe" in the Three Stooges.

In fact, he is quite a fine actor. Watch "The Bravados" just to see him and you will be getting your money's worth.

Other actors, playing sheriff, bad guys, deputies, and others, are all among the top players in films, even if only a very few of them became the household names they should have. Excellent, all of them.

There is one directorial, or perhaps writing, flaw, one made often by Hollywood, as far back as its earliest days: A guard up on a hill is shot down by a bunch of galloping horsemen firing pistols. Pretty nearly impossible, in real life, but I guess it's a convention generally accepted -- except by me and by viewers really knowledgeable about firearms.

Otherwise, the directing is, as one expects from Henry King, pretty much right on; and the writing, script by Philip Yordan from a novel by Frank O'Rourke, gives us something Hollywood so often elsewhere got wrong, the impact of religion.

I was lucky enough to watch this at YouTube, in a pretty good print, except for some jerkiness, that was rudely interrupted by commercials!

Still, otherwise it was free, and there is another version there that one must buy or rent and still another in a wrong format that makes it almost impossible to read the credits. If you go to YouTube, pick carefully, but do, somehow and somewhere, watch "The Bravados."

score 9/10

morrisonhimself 1 August 2015

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3289152/