Good "chase" Western

doug-balch

This is a well made revenge yarn starring Gregory Peck as a small Arizona cattle rancher out to avenge the rape and murder of his wife. The bulk of the movie follows him as he leads a posse tracking four suspects attempting to escape to Mexico. This was a well done and compelling drama. I gave it six stars out of 10 in IMDb. It scored 14 points in my IMDb ranking. Both are good scores.

Here were its better points:

The four villains are played by very good actors: Stephen Boyd, Albert Salmi, Lee Van Cleef and Henry Silva. More importantly, their characters are very well developed. The script manages to create sympathy for them, even though they have few redeeming qualities. Stephen Boyd is excellent and carries the movie on his back.

The bulk of this movie was filmed on location in a very attractive mountainous area of northern Mexcio. The exciting manhunt takes place against stunning vistas and is accompanied by one of the better musical scores I can remember. I particularly enjoyed the horns, including some intense passages by the orchestra's trombone section.

I'm not a big Gregory Peck fan, but he was well cast and credible in this role.

The movie is thematically interesting and complex. I'd rather not discuss in detail, as it would probably give too much of the movie away.

There were very well developed Mexican themes. This included Mexicans who can actually speak Spanish, if you can believe it. It reminded me of the extended French dialogue among the trappers in Howard Hawk's "The Big Sky".

Here's what kept the movie from being better:

Joan Collins comes close to sinking the whole ship as the gratuitous romantic lead.

Boyd's character should have had more screen time. I would like to have seen the outlaw group limited to just Silva and Boyd. His malevolent charisma was great counterpoint to Peck's grim, emotionally repressed assassin.

Peck is a cattle rancher. They should have explained why he is such an effective and experienced manhunter.

I found the presence of a 100% Catholic town in 1880's Arizona to be inaccurate. The majority of white settlers at this time were biblical Protestants, who wouldn't have been caught dead attending a Catholic mass. Certainly the town could have had an old Spanish mission and many Catholic Mexican residents who attended it, but I didn't see any Mexicans in the town. The congregants all appeared to be white. This was probably just Hollywood once again displaying its total ignorance of Christianity.

SPOILERS BELOW!!!!!!!!!!

There were a number of other plot holes. For example, Peck's character lives too close to town to appear as a "mysterious stranger". Surely rape/murders weren't so common in the area that the death of his wife hadn't been big news six months earlier. Same thing with the hangman, whom someone should have been able to recognize. At one point, Joan Collins teleports over 100 miles of rough country.

And finally, what is the justification for letting Henry Silva's character go free at the end? He was an accessory to two on screen murders and an the attempted murder of a sheriff. And let's not forget he had already been convicted and sentenced to hang for crimes committed before the movie began. Since the movie is supposedly a celebration of "doing the right thing", this must just be an idiotic mistake.

Production code rapes were really weird. This one was very similar to the one in "Rancho Notorious". The rapist makes sexually suggestive advances to the victim, the camera cuts away from them, there are a couple of screams from the woman, then the rapist almost immediately runs back on camera. The rape seemingly takes place in about 15 seconds of live time. This isn't a criticism, just an observation.

score 6/10

doug-balch 6 October 2010

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2320473/