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Plot:
Before The Wild Bunch, there was The Professionals, Richard Brooks's marvelous ode to friendship, loyalty, and disillusionment. It may not have the stylistic bravado or fatalistic doom ...( read more 
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MCT:July 25, 2008Someone once insisted that no one but Lee Marvin could play Nick Fury. It's movies like these that really validate that comment.
This is another one of those movies that gets a whole bunch of celebrities and bad-assery ensues in droves. Now, I'm not saying that this movie has the star power of, say, The Magnificent Seven, but Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, and Jack Palance in one movie is completely different dynamic than throwing Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, and Charles Bronson together. Those actors are fantastic actors. Really, putting Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin on the same screen makes me worry about my wallet and I'll refuse to even glance over at their girlfriends in fear that they'll kick my ass on a whim. Really, this movie smells of testosterone. It's one of those movies that you know things will go well for the characters, but it is going to be a b*tch the entire way through. Things just keep on happening to these characters and they manage to get around these situations.
I'd like to address Jack Palance first of all. Palance is a Ukrainian. Believe me. I have this on the best authority that the man is Ukrainian. Every time my mom sees him on screen, she tells me about how Ukrainian the man is. So seeing him play a Mexican rebel / outlaw is just amusing as hell. We all know that he's as white bread as it gets, but I guess they cared more about getting the most badassness for their buck that they just didn't care what nationality the man carried. Really, I stopped giggling a second in because he's a pretty commanding presence in this movie. That's right. Curly actually does a pretty good job of grabbing attention and keeping it, so I really can't begrudge his performance. He does his job and he does it well.
Now, normally, I'd be talking about how much I am afraid of Lee Marvin and respect his performance out of fear that he'd come back from the dead and kick my ass. (He would, too!) But the real moment in this moment goes to Burt Lancaster. Now, while most of the movie is the Western equivalent of a heist movie, there's one movie that actually allows for drama and tension rather than the simple coolness that the movie naturally exudes. I am speaking of the showdown scene between Lancaster and Palance. Now, let's get this straight. There is some really cool stuff that goes on here. In fact, it is really cool. But there's this odd dramatic tension that goes on. You know that these guys are in the wrong at this point of the film, but there's this duality that you can't deny about their situation. The movie actually turns the viewer into a co-conspirator in this caper and you root for justice to, in fact, fail. How bizarre is that? There's this really dramatic tension when old friends square off. They're all crooks (or have been at some point) and they all knew that this day would come. That's a heck of an acting scene and it really comes off fantastically.
The end is a little too clean for me, but it kind of had to happen. The thing about caper films is that they can't end too perfect for everyone. We live in a world that we need to have justice to some extent. Even anti-heroes deliver some form of justice and that's kind of what we see here. I know that this is the end they had to settle on, but it just seemed a bit out of character for what the movie was all about.
It's a fun action caper movie in a Western format. I won't say it is perfect, but gosh darn it if it isn't fun. -
MCT:May 31, 2008
I have seen this movie floating around stores for some time now, and until recently categorized it as "western" and then ignored it. Yes, friends, I, too, was one of those people who said "Eugh, westerns? No thanks!" with nary a gander at their actual qualities or failings. I used to find the endless brown and earthtone colour palettes boring--plus an awful lot of them were slowly paced, and they certainly had neither aliens nor monsters, which meant that in my early days they were categorically boring. The colour palette was the last thing for me to get over--beyond the added minor hump of the idiot generalizations that they are all gung-ho, machismo bad writing and insipid plots.
But once I noticed this one had Lee Marvin and I knew who that was, well, it became a lot more interesting. The inclusion of a black man (Woody Strode) and Burt Lancaster (even if I'd only seen him in The Rainmaker--if even that, as I can't be sure I did see it, and not just clips) sort of sealed the deal.
Ralph Bellamy (Joe Grant) hires a team of aging experts--the titular professionals--to rescue his wife Maria (Claudia Cardinale who is, oh, hey, from my favourite western ever--Once Upon a Time in the West!) from the clutches of Mexican bandit Jesus Raza (Jack Palance...yes, as a Mexican bandit). Each one of them is an expert in a particular field related to the rescue of a hostage from a group of armed professionals: Henry "Rico" Fardan (Marvin) is a seasoned leader who once worked alongside Raza in the Mexican revolution, Hans Ehrengard (Robert Ryan) is a horseman, Jake Sharp (Strode) is a tracker and marksman with the silent bow-and-arrow, and at Fardan's encouragement, the fourth, Bill Dolworth (Lancaster) is hired as expert in explosives. They re-evaluate the plan to track down Raza and reclaim Grant's wife and re-plan the whole thing themselves to acknowledge the dangers they know as professionals and as people experienced with Raza and his gang. The curious element that intrudes is the familiarity Fardan and Dolworth have with Raza--they question how this man they worked alongside could be turned to a simple kidnapper from the man they once knew. But even with these questions, they do not hesitate to perform the job they were hired to do. But their morality does not fail them, and they will not completely follow orders into hell without a thought.
This is yet another in the string of westerns about badass gunslingers past their time in the world, (see also: The Wild Bunch, The Magnificent Seven, Ride the High Country...) which tend to be my favourite variety of westerns, a bit of good old-fashioned cynicism about the encroaching industry and business-based world. While I tend to run in circles that would be more annoyed by the show of machismo and moral simplicity (of a kind), as well as the tendency toward violent solutions and possibly perceived misogyny (I tend to take such things stride in some ways when it comes to film--most of them come from a period when this was the dynamic, whether one likes it or not, though I have no interest in the actual practice) or at least sexism, I find this kind of dying breed of John Wayne character fascinating and admirable for what it is--and I do mean the John Wayne of actual film appearances, not the idiotically simplified version of him as simple, brute of a man, but the one that has some flaws within that general archetype. Marvin and Lancaster are perfect for these roles, managing to more perfectly feel like aging professionals in the field of warefare than the more bold, starring variety seen in people like Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen (both of whom I like, mind you) in The Magnificent Seven. It's a pair that, even if they did not do westerns prior (of course they did) they would have the look of rough men, despite Lancaster's earlier reputation as "hunk," and so we can see more in their faces to suggest this tired past and this loss of place in the world.
Richard Brooks does an admirable job of getting our boys through this journey--it is a fabulous script, with some real great zingers of wit thrown around, mostly by Marvin and Lancaster, in a way that they manage to make look effortless and off-the-cuff, and with a nice pacing and movement that keeps us moving from plan to execution to changes to denouement.
Not a film that breaks my appreciation for almost all (if not all) of the westerns I've seen, and one that makes me even more wish to encourage those who shared my prior bias to look beyond it and give films like this a shot. Fun and smart, like you just don't seem to see anymore, with that wonderful sense that these are the characters, not actors or faces, and that those lines were not specifically set up and designed to catch the audience but were just what they would say at that time. -
MCT:January 8, 2008
This is Badass.
Jack Palance as a mexican
Lee Marvin as Lee Marvin
A mine car chase
Exploding arrows
The glorious cleavage of Claudia Cardinale -
MCT:November 18, 2007
One of the last great westerns of a slowly fading genre (revived in the early 90's), this film features a great cast and earned Oscar nods for it's directing, screenplay and cinemetography.
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MCT:June 1, 2007
Politisk konspirationsfilm, förklädd till western, som låg före sin tid. Intrigen skulle passa utmärkt in i den frisinnade amerikanska 70-tals filmen om man bortser från den yttre handlingen som är ganska typisk med för westernfilmen, alla tillhörande element. Den brokiga samlingen skådespelare med hårdingar som Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Jack Palance och Lee Marvin är alla helgjutna och Ralph Bellamy som den mystiske uppdragsgivaren gör ingen särskilt besviken. Denna film hade säkerligen en viss påverkan på Sergio Leone & co. då både Woody Strode och Claudia Cardinale återfinns i Leones Once upon a time in the west. Utöver skådespeleriet så är det fotot (av Conrad Hall) som övertygar mest liksom den oförutsägbara intrigen. Klart Sevärd.
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MCT:December 14, 2006
Featuring an incredible collection of bad-asses (Marvin, Lancaster, Ryan and Strode), one super hotty (Claudia Cardinale) and three words to describe Jack Palance: BEST MEXICAN EVER. While these guys don't quite have the camraderie of the boys in Rio Bravo, or a story to suit their talents like the Seven, or the ambiguity of the Wild Bunch, the flick is still a ton of fun.
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