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The Gary Cooper introduced atop a limping horse in the middle of the desert is the one from The Plainsman and The Westerner, Robert Aldrich chips away at the icon in an analysis later completed by Mann (Man of the West). The ex-Confederate colonel renting out his services in Maximilian's Mexico is one head of American adventurism, the other one facing him Janus-style is Burt Lancaster's grinning cutthroat, who, with no scruples to weigh him down, is better adapted to the times. The imperial "crocodile" (Cesar Romero) offers them riches, the revolutionary officer (Morris Ankrum) has only his noble cause (and a campesino army, revealed armed on rooftops in a low-angled, circular panning shot). "Wars are not won by killing children," intones the sombrero-haloed Juarista, though the gringos and their buccaneers (including Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, and Jack Elam) know better. The Emperor (George Macready) is an amateur marksman who tests a rifle on the help ("I better stop, we have a servant problem as is"), the MacGuffin is a gold shipment inside a fabulous carriage. The ride to Vera Cruz pairs each man with his female counterpart—Lancaster's ruthlessness earns him an equally corrupt French countess (Denise Darcel) while Cooper's grudging gallantry is matched by Sara Montiel's closet morality as the pickpocket. "It's hard to be a patriot on an empty stomach." The frontier nature that once enraptured the director of Apache gives way here to the colonial arches that frame the characters' double and triple-crosses, and the Aztec pyramids that dwarf them. Gatling guns prepare the showdown, empty hands leave it behind. A brackish despair lies behind Aldrich's humorous veneer and lush eye, a clear path carved toward The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Duck, You Sucker. With James McCallion, James Seay, Henry Brandon, Archie Savage, and Jack Lambert.
--- Fernando F. Croce |