There’s a terrific western directed by John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven, 1960) inside this Rat Pack offering, the second of four in the series. On the plus side are plenty twists on traditional scenarios, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin displaying a certain kind of easy screen charisma, and three exceptional and well-choreographed battle scenes. Sinatra, Martin and Peter Lawford play the eponymous sergeants, Lawford committing the cardinal sin of wanting to quit the regiment to get married, with Sammy Davis Jr. as a former slave, bugler (an important plot point) and horse-lover wanting to sign up, and Joey Bishop (television star and occasional movie actor) as their sergeant-major boss.
A fair bit of time is spent on the usual Rat Pack shenanigans, getting drunk, brawling, playing tricks on each other, and exploring odd comic notions such as playing poker with a blacksmith’s implements as chips. But when it gets down to proper western stuff, it fairly zings along, with a decent plot (a Native American uprising) and excellent action scenes. You could have had William Goldman writing the script for the number of reversals, where the picture keeps one step ahead of audience expectation.
For a start, rather than flushing out outlaws from a town, the troopers have to remove Native Americans who have taken it over. Instead of the cavalry pursuing Native Americans, it is mostly the other way round. It is the soldiers rather than the Native Americans who attack a wagon. Sinatra finds himself employing a bow-and-arrow and then a tomahawk rather than being on the receiving end of such weaponry. Instead of dynamite, the good guys make do with fireworks. Where Native Americans are usually pinned down, this time it is Sinatra’s merry band. And when it comes to resorting to serious violence, that, too is usually the remit of the Native Americans, not as here, Sinatra chucking man off a cliff.
When it sticks to action, the picture is very well done and involving. When Sinatra has to take charge instead of larking about, the movie has focus. Both Sinatra and Martin were undertaking serious roles around this time, the former in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), the latter in political drama Ada (1961) so this might have appeared welcome relief. The comedy isn’t along the laugh-out-loud lines of Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) or Blazing Saddles (1973) and the action of so full-on you wonder why anybody thought this required comedy at all, although there is a pretty good punchline ending. Action aside, it’s almost the equivalent of easy listening. The Rat Pack was a particular 1960s institution, the members joining each other on stage in Las Vegas or featuring in television programs, but there’s no real modern correlative.
It was interesting to see how the Rat Pack concept developed. This movie chucked out the idea of including a few songs as with Oceans 11 (1960) while the next one in the series, 4 for Texas (1963) was more of a serious straight western. But the final picture Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964) went in the opposition direction and was a full-on musical as if by the time they came to making that picture everyone had realized the film would make more sense if it played to their inestimable talents. The series developed in other ways, too. Romance was minimal in Oceans 11, barely seen here, but was a major element of 4 for Texas – who would want to waste the talents of Ursula Andress and Anita Ekberg – but just as Andress is a smooth operator in 4 for Texas when it came to the last Rat Pack picture Barbara Rush was also a significant player for whom romance was merely a means to an end.
Derring-do and heroism were the 1960s war movie default with enemies clearly signposted in black-and-white. This one doesn’t fall into that category, in fact doesn’t fall into any category, being more concerned with the military and political machinations pervasive on both sides in war. Movies about revolutions generally succeed if they are filmed from the perspective of the insurrectionists. When they take the side of the oppressor, almost automatically they lose the sympathy vote, The Green Berets (1968) in this decade being a typical example, although the sheer directorial skill of Francis Coppola turned that notion on its head with Apocalypse Now (1979) when slaughter was accompanied by majesty.
In the 1950s-1960s the French had come off worse in two uprisings, Vietnam and Algiers. This movie covers the tail end of the former and the middle of the latter and it’s a curious hybrid, part Dirty Dozen, part John Wayne, part dirty tricks on either side, with a few ounces of romance thrown in.
Col Raspeguy (Anthony Quinn, in unlikely athletic mode – that’s him leaping in the poster) is the officer of a paratroop regiment who sees out the debacle of the final battle of the French war in Vietnam, loses his commission, and then, reprieved, is posted to Algeria, where the fight for independence is in full swing, with a ragbag of rejects plus some faithful comrades from his previous command. In any spare moment, the colonel can be seen keeping fit, doing handstands, swinging his arms, puffing out his chest, and a fair bit of running (presumably to avoid the contention that Quinn was too old for this part). Sidekick Capt Esclavier (Alain Delon) is a bit too moralistic for the dangerous business of war, plays his sidekick. The colonel is an ideal anti-hero for a hero, an officer who ignores, challenges or just plain overrides authority, adored by his men, hated by the enemy, ruthless when it matters.
The brutal realism, which sometimes makes you quail, is nonetheless the best thing about the picture, no holds barred here when it comes to portraying the ugly side of battle. The training in The Dirty Dozen is a doddle compared to here, soldiers who don’t move fast enough are actually shot, rather than just threatened with live ammunition, and there’s no second chance for the incompetent – at the passing out ceremony several are summarily dismissed. The only kind of Dirty Dozen-type humor is a soldier who fills his canteen with wine. Otherwise, this is a full-on war.
Battles are fought guerilla style, the enemy as smart as the Vietnamese, catching out the French in ambushes, using infiltrators sympathetic to the cause and terrorism. Unlike Apocalypse Now where the infantry appeared as dumb as they come, relying on strength in numbers and superior weaponry, Lost Command at least has an officer who understands strategy and most of what ensues involves clever thinking. The battles, played out in the mountains, usually see the French having to escape tricky situations rather than blasting through the enemy like cavalry, although having sneakily pinched a mayor’s helicopter gives Raspeguy’s team the opportunity to strafe the enemy on the rare occasions when they can actually be found, their camouflage professionally done.
Arab rebel chief Lt Mahidi (George Segal, unrecognizable under a slab of make-up apart from his flashing white teeth), matches the French in terms of tactics and brutality, shooting one of his own men for disobeying orders. His sister Aicha (Claudia Cardinale) is the femme fatale making a play for Esclavier, though he’d have to be a lot dumber than the audience to fall for her obvious ploys (guess what, he is dumber). With both sides determined to win at all costs, atrocities are merely viewed as collateral damage, so in that respect it’s an unflinching take on war.
The picture could have done with another 15 minutes or so to allow characters to breathe and develop some of the supporting cast. The movie did well in France but sank in the States where my guess is few of the audience would even know where Algeria was. Gilles Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, out the same year, gave the revolutionaries the leading role.
For the most part Anthony Quinn (Guns for San Sebastian, 1968) is in bull-in-a-china-shop form but his character is more rounded in a romantic interlude with a countess (Michele Morgan), his ability to outsmart his superior officers, his camaraderie with his own soldiers and, perhaps more surprisingly, the ongoing exercise routines which reveal, rather than a keep-fit fanatic, an ageing soldier worried about running out of steam. Alain Delon (Texas Across the River, 1967) is entrusted with the morally ambivalent role. George Segal (The Quiller Memorandum, 1966) presumably didn’t realize how culturally inappropriate he would be.
Mark Robson (The Prize, 1963) lets worthy get in the way of action. Screenwriter Nelson Gidding (Nine Hours to Rama, 1963) had the same problem.
Set the politics aside and it becomes much more interesting.
Best viewed as Charles Bronson’s breakout movie. Yes, he had played supporting roles in The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen, but these had all been versions of the same dour, almost monosyllabic, persona. Here, though somewhat ruthless, he steals the show from the top-billed Robert Mitchum and Yul Brynner with many of the best lines and best situations with an extra slice of humor (make that first-ever slice of humor) to add to the mix. He is the most interesting of the three main characters, in part because he does not have to spout any of the “good revolution/bad revolution” dialog that falls to the other two.
Villa (Brynner) is fighting the Colorados but his superior General Huertas (Herbert Lom) is planning to overthrow President Madero (Alexander Knox). Mitchum is an aeronautical gun-runner from El Paso, initially against the revolutionaries, stranded in Mexico when his plane breaks down. He has just about time to romance a local woman Fina (Maria Grazia Buccello) before the Colorados arrive, take over the village, start hanging the leaders and raping Fina. Villa saves them, Bronson slaughtering the Colorados with a Gatling gun on the rooftop. Faced with the one-man firing squad that is Bronson, Mitchum turns sides. His plane comes in handy for scouting the enemy, then bombing them.
The actions sequences are terrific especially Villa’s attack on a troop train. To get Villa out of the way, Huertas puts him in the front line in a suicidal attack on a heavily-defended stronghold which turns into another brilliant set-piece with cavalry charges. The plot is constantly interrupted by politics of one kind or another and comes to dead stop when Villa is arrested by Heurtas and Villa demands a proper trial. It’s kind of hard to take when a murdering bandit, no matter how legendary, decides that he has been hard done by.
That aside, there are interesting attempts to build up his legend. He doesn’t want power for himself, but to give it to the people, although he has sat back and let the first village be attacked so that the people there learn to hate the Colorados enough to join the fight. There’s not really any good guys – Brynner and Bronson are stone-cold killers, Mitchum a mercenary. But Brynner does marry Fina in order to prove that a raped woman should not be treated with dishonor, though he has a tendency to marry other women as well.
Bronson’s unusual one-man firing squad involves him laying on the ground with a pistol in each hand and giving prisoners the opportunity to escape before he shoots them. After all that hard work, he bathes his hands. Then he decides he can kill three men with one bullet, lining them up exactly so he can drill them all in the heart. But he’s also the one who shoots a molester in a cantina, then delivers the classic line: “Go outside and die, where are your manners?” He is at the heart of some well-judged comedy – continually sending back his meals and trying to get out of getting into a plane with Mitchum. Without him, there would be too much justification of slaughter (Brynner) and arguments against (Mitchum). This is the first time in the kind of action role that suits him that he has an expanded characterization.
Brynner did not like Sam Peckinpah’s original script so Robert Towne (Chinatown) was brought in to present Villa in a more appealing light. Bronson (Adieu L’Ami/Farewell Friend, 1968) shows hints of the screen persona that would so appeal to the French. Yul Brynner (The Double Man, 1967) adorns his character with many shades of grey, but Robert Mitchum (Secret Ceremony, 1969) has less to do. Buzz Kulik (Warning Shot, 19660 has great fun with the action, less fun with some of the turgid dialog-ridden scenes.
Off-beat Oscar-nominated comedy-drama that is both a marvelous piece of whimsy and a slice of social realism set in the kind of Britain the tourist boards forget, all drizzle and grime. It zips from Edinburgh to Sheffield to Bath to London to Brighton to Jersey as if the characters had been dumped from an If It’s Tuesday It Must Be Belgium sketch. If your idea of Italy was Fellini’s glorious decadence or Hollywood romance amid historic ruins and fabulous beaches, then the upbringing of Assunta (Monica Vitti) is the repressive opposite.
All women in her small town wear black. Men are not allowed to dance with women and must make do with each other. A man like Vincenzo (Carlo Giuffre) desiring sex must kidnap a woman, in this case Assunta, to which she will consent as long as he marries her. When instead he runs off to Scotland, she is dishonored and must kill him, armed with the titular pistol.
Pursuit first takes her to Edinburgh and a job as a maid, has a hilarious encounter with a Scottish drunk, and various other cross-cultural misinterpretations – in a bar she cools herself down with an ice-cube then puts it back in the bucket. Then it’s off to Sheffield where she falls in with car mechanic Anthony Booth (television’s Till Death Do Us Part) because he is wearing Italian shoes.
She can’t imagine he can watch sport for two hours. “You’re a man, I’m a woman, nobody in the house and you look at the television.” Although tormented by images of being attacked back home by a screaming mob of black-robed women, she begins to shed her inhibitions, wearing trendier clothes, although an umbrella is essential in rain-drenched Britain and given the Italian preference for shooting exteriors.
In between sightings of Vincenzo there are episodes with a suicidal gay man (Corin Redgrave) and a doctor (Stanley Baker). She becomes a nurse, then a part-time model, sings Italian songs in an Italian restaurant, drives a white mini, wears a red curly wig and more extravagant fashions. It turns out she can’t shoot straight. Gradually, the mad chorus of home gives way to feminist self-assertion as she becomes less dependent on men and a world run by chauvinists. It’s a startling mixture of laugh-out-loud humor and social observation. And while the narrative that at times verges on the bizarre, Assunta’s actions all appear logical given her frame of mind.
Vitti was Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s muse (and companion) through L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962) to Red Desert (1964). She had a brief fling with the more commercial, though still somewhat arty, movie world in Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966) and the nothing-artistic-about-it comedy On the Way to the Crusades (aka The Chastity Belt, 1968) with Tony Curtis. Director Mario Monicello had two Oscar nominations for writing but was best-known for Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) and Casanova ’70 (1965). Girl with a Pistol was nominated in the Best Foreign Language film category at the Oscars.
Armed robbers lack the finesse of a jewel thief or burglar when it comes to pulling off a major heist. Rather than resorting to the weaponry of the title, they are more inclined, as John Cassavetes does here, to plant bombs, both as a diversionary tactic and within the target building, in this case a Las Vegas casino.
Although boasting Hollywood leads in Cassavetes and Peter Falk and rising Swedish leading lady Britt Ekland (The Double Man, 1967) and wife of star Peter Sellers, this was an Italian-made gangster thriller with the usual abundance of location work. Without the romantic complications of A Fine Pair (1968) it concentrates on the machinations of the central characters.
And it is a pretty lean machine. The robbery takes place against the background of warring Mafia chieftains, West coast boss Charlie Adamo (Peter Falk) trying to muscle in on a Vegas casino without being aware it is controlled by the New York hierarchy. Hank McCain (John Cassavetes) does not realize the robbery has been set up by his naïve son Jack (Pierluigi Apra) on behalf of Adamo. Irene Tucker (Britt Ekland) is on board as a kind of mostly mute magician’s assistant, helping out Hank.
Little dialogue comes Cassavetes’ way, either, which plays to his strength, that glowering intense unpredictable weasel-face, whose reactions are less likely to be emotional than violent. Falk gets the dialog and little help it does him, his goose is cooked when he has the temerity to shout at the New York kingpin.
Yet this slimmed-down documentary-style hard-nosed picture in the vein of Point Blank (1967) manages several touching moments, even more effective for completely lacking sentimentality. When Hank’s son is knifed in the back, the gangster finishes him off with a burst from the titular machine gun rather than see him suffer. His old flame Rosemary (Gene Rowlands), making too brief an appearance, has a wall covered in newspaper headlines of herself with Hank celebrating her life as his moll and she accepts without enmity the new woman in his life and she proves the toughest moll of all when confronted with Mafia gunslingers..
The planning of the heist is well done, no explanatory dialog, just action on screen; there’s a car chase; and the gangster dragnet is unexpectedly powerful. Gabriele Ferzetti (the railroad baron in Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968) is excellent as the calm authoritative New York boss, Falk a bit too excitable, and Florinda Balkan (The Last Valley, 1971), in her third screen role, has a small part as a traitorous moll. Ekland is surprisingly good with not much to play with, a couple of lines here and there but still emoting with her face.
Cassavetes, who always claimed he was only acting to fill in the time between directing (Faces, 1968), and as a means of financing them, was at a career peak, Oscar-nominated for The Dirty Dozen (1967) and male lead in Rosemary’s Baby (1968). He had just appeared in another Italian gangster movie Bandits in Rome (1968). Cassavetes and Falk would go on to have a fruitful partnership over another five films. Falk and Ekland had played opposite each other in Too Many Thieves (1967). Falk also had an Oscar nod behind him for Murder Inc. (1961) but his career was about to go in a different direction after the TV movie Presciption: Murder (1968) that introduced Columbo.
Trivia trackers might also note a score by Ennio Morricone. Though not one of his best, a few years later he would deliver one of his most memorable themes for Sacco and Vanzetti (1971) for the same director Giuliano Montaldo.
Every now and then in the writing of my blog an event occurs which comes as a great surprise. Last year, I was contacted from Los Angeles by Claudia Pretelin, a producer working for DVD specialist Vinegar Syndrome. They were planning a 4K restoration of Five Card Stud (1968) and, alighting on my review of the movie, Claudia asked if I would do the audio commentary, especially as I had detected the strong feminist undercurrent that runs through the western.
Five years ago, McFarland had published my book The Gunslingers of ’69: The Westerns’ Greatest Year. But if I had been writing about 1968, Five Card Stud would be one of the standouts. For whatever reason, it’s so under-rated it’s almost been completely forgotten, overshadowed by the three other westerns Henry Hathaway made either side of it, most importantly True Grit (1969) and The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) . Overshadowed because it wasn’t made by John Ford or Howard Hawks. Together with Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood they were the directors most admired by critics. Overshadowed because it didn’t star John Wayne or James Stewart, both considered essential elements to any great western. Overshadowed because nobody gave a damn about Dean Martin (Rough Night in Jericho, 1967) as a serious actor.
But from the outset, this is distinctive with recurrent motifs and a visual symmetry – overhead camera, water, strangulation, the card table – that seems to have gone unnoticed, unlike The Searchers. Given the testosterone on display – Robert Mitchum (Secret Ceremony, 1969) in addition to Dean Martin – this is unusually an extremely feminist western. The three female leads are far from docile and screenwriter Marguerite Roberts has changed the source book, Glory Gulch by Ray Gaulden, to exploit those elements.
Entrepreneur Lily (Inger Stevens) runs an upmarket barbershop – generally a male monopoly – with an interesting sideline, but when it comes to romance she’s in charge, choosing – and dumping – the men. Nora (Katherine Justice) is a rancher’s daughter so smart and effective that her father has already decided that he’s going to leave her a half-share in his business rather than, as would be the norm, leaving it all to his son Nick (Roddy McDowell). Mama Malone (Ruth Springford) owns the eponymous saloon and takes no sass from anybody.
Van (Dean Martin) likes to think he has the measure of women, when in fact they have the measure of him. The story avoids the obvious lure of a love triangle, of jealous women competing for Van’s affections. Both the young Nora and the more mature Lily are pretty well grounded and judge their men by the standard of their kissing – that’s equality for you.
The movie was one of the fastest ever made, just five months from the start of shooting to release – that’s efficiency for you. And for many critics that was how they regarded director Henry Hathaway. He wasn’t considered a stylist, but a studio workhorse, apt to take what was offered, work in too many genres. But this is one of his most stylish films. In some ways it harks back to film noir. The story is a mystery. And his extensive use of overhead camera would be considered innovative had it been made now.
This is in fact about a serial killer, a treatise on law and order, almost acting as a conduit between the decade’s previous westerns when the good guys and the bad guys are easily distinguished to the end of the decade when such distinctions were muddied. Here, we don’t know who the bad guy is. He’s not a hero saving a town or enforcing law and order. Not a detective either, trying to nail down a killer. He’s only trying to save his own skin. The whodunit is really a MacGuffin, an opportunity to examine the hypocrisies of the West.
The Sons of Katie Elder, Nevada Smith (1966) and Five Card Stud are all about revenge, justified in you like in the first two. Play this another way and the vengeful preacher Rudd (Robert Mitchum) would be the hero, vindicated as much as characters in Hang ‘Em High (1968), Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) or True Grit.
Producer Hal B. Wallis (True Grit) bought Ray Gaulden’s western Glory Gulch in May 1967, three months after publication by Berkeley Medallion as a paperback original. (Reprinted a year later, it was re-titled Five Card Stud). It came cheap. Nobody else was bidding. Robert Redford (Downhill Racer, 1969) turned down the role of Rudd – he thought the character too obvious and didn’t like the way the narrative developed – so Robert Mitchum was actually second choice.
Filming was due to start in October 1967 but was delayed till February 1968. It was shot in Durango – a popular locale also utilized for Guns for San Sebastian (1968), Shalako (1968) and The Scalphunters (1968) – and Churabasco Studios in Mexico City. There were 22 actors and 52 crew. The main location was 8,000ft up on the Sierra Madre mountains. The actors were billeted in a motel, but Mitchum, demanding peace and quiet, had the end room so got more of the cold and required a portable oxygen tank. Instead of privacy he was frozen. The boilers didn’t work and allocated a single blanket he ended up piling all his clothes on the bed. Roddy McDowell wasn’t hired until after shooting began and he modelled his somewhat hippie sideburns after George Harrison. Mitchum was nearly crushed to death by a falling 18th high camera pedestal. While the two stars didn’t particularly hit it off there was no animosity either.
Some of those involved scarcely needed to work. Dean Martin was one of the richest men in the business. At a time when the very top stars took home $750,000 a picture, say $1.5 million if they made two movies a year, Martin took home closer to $5 million a year when you totted up fees from his television show, movies, records and performing. McDowell was the co-owner of a thriving disco franchise. Hathaway had just sold his stake in an oil business for $18 million.
Marguerite Roberts had been one of the top-earning screenwriters in the Hollywood
Golden Age. Starting out in 1933, her credits included Honky Tonk (1941) with Clark Gable and Lana Turner, The Sea of Grass (1947) starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and MGM’s big-budget blockbuster Ivanhoe (1951) teaming Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor. Around the time of Five Card Stud she had two other projects on studio slates, Hero Suit and Flight and Pursuit, though neither was made and it was perhaps ironic that her next assignment concerned a lawman who took the same no-holds-barred approach to the criminal fraternity, namely True Grit, as the killer in this picture.
Filming began on February 7 and finished on April 14. It opened on July 12. That was a phenomenal turnaround for the period. A Time for a Killing/The Long Ride Home (1967), also starring Inger Stevens, took 16 months to reach the screen. In 1967 there were 125 films in studio backlogs – movies completed but no release date set as yet as yet, studios in no hurry, and often first run cinemas in the major cities clogged up by roadshows or long-running hits.
The western from mid-1960s had become the default for many stars. Where earlier in the decade stars might mix western and war with comedy and drama now for many top names for a period of three, four or five years they appeared either exclusively or almost exclusively in westerns. From 1965 to 1968 except for Matt Helm and one comedy Dean Martin had tackled five westerns. In the same period for James Stewart four out of five were westerns. For Mitchum it was four straight westerns from 1966 to 1968. In two years starting in 1967, four out of five Inger Stevens pictures were westerns. In three years, Glenn Ford made five straight westerns and after Battle of the Bulge (1965) Henry Fonda made four straight westerns. It was the same for directors: between 1965 and 1971 Andrew V. McLaglen made nothing but, and Burt Kennedy, in one year less, seven out of eight.
DVD with 4K restoration and audio commentary by yours truly available to pre-order and comes out in a few days.
Remembering this picture as a summer holiday matinee of stiff-upper-lip entangled in all sorts of Khartoumery, I came at this film with low expectations. Given producer Charles H. Schneer’s (First Men in the Moon, 1964) involvement, there were no Ray Harryhausen magical special effects. I was only aware of star Anthony Quayle as a bluff supporting actor in epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) and Sylvia Syms as a willowy supporting actress (The World of Suzie Wong, 1960).
So I was in for a pleasant surprise. Take away the back projection, stock footage and the unlikely zoo of wild animals and there is a fairly decent action film set in the Sudan on the fringes of the Mahdi uprising (that story filmed as Khartoum the following year).
Baker (Anthony Quayle), former army sergeant awaiting court martial, escapes from a battle near Khartoum, saving governess Miss Woodville (Sylvia Syms), her charge Asua (Jenny Agutter making her debut), officer Muchison (Basil Fowlds) and a wounded soldier. The motley crew flees down the Nile in a boat. You know you are in for something quite different when the soldier dies and Baker wants to toss him overboard. Overruled by prim Miss Woodville and by-the-book Murchison, this good deed is rewarded by losing their beached boat while burying the dead.
A picture like this only survives on twists. Burning the remainder of their boat to attract the attention of the British relief force only brings in their wake a mob of Arabs, who we are informed, in a spicy exchange, don’t know the ten commandments, especially “thou shalt not kill.”
The movie turns into a battle of the sexes, with Woodville’s innocence and good breeding quickly eroded in the face of danger, her natural antipathy towards a scallywag like Baker softening. Lacking due deference, said scallywag is given some choice lines which spark up proceedings. It being Africa, the animals have nothing better to do than torment them, so cue snakes, crocodiles, charging rhinos, hippos, elephants without even a decent monkey to lighten proceedings. Baker sets his ruthless tendences to one side to take a tender, paternal interest in young Asua. Ongoing action prevents the usual male-female meet-cute African Queen-style banter and it’s all the better for it.
Capture by African tribesman takes the story on an interesting detour. Baker, attempting to make friends, shouts out despairingly, “Don’t any of you even speak English?” only for chieftain Kimrasi (Johnny Sekka) to stride out of the bushes with the reply, “I speak, English, Arabic and Swahili.” Baker explains, “We come in peace.” The chief retorts, “With gun in hand?”
Game on! The plot goes offbeat for w while when we become involved in Kimrasi’s life. A former slave, his village presents an unusually realistic alternative world not least for Asua, ill by this time, saved by an African witch doctor. There are further surprises, clever ruses to foil the enemy, revelations about Woodville and a surprising but very British ending.
Quayle is convincing, reveling in the opportunity to create a fully-formed character rather than confined to a small chunk of a picture. Syms, too, with more on offer than normal, Agutter (Walkabout, 1971) not a precocious Disney cut-out, and Fowlds revealing what did for all those years before turning up on television as puppet Basil Brush’s sidekick. As a British B-picture making do on a small budget, it overcomes this particular deficiency with some sparkling dialog and attitudes that go against both the time in which it was set and the era in which it was made. Directed by Nathan Juran (First Men in the Moon) from a screenplay by Jud Kinberg (Siege of the Saxons, 1963).
A curiosity. Something of vanity project for star James Cagney (One, Two, Three, 1961) – in his penultimate leading role – who doubled up as producer. But more of a documentary than a war picture. Witness, no scenes of actual World War II combat for a start. And going down the same annoying route as The St Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) where the voice-over pretty much tells you what everyone had for breakfast and in that vein goes on to tell you whether or not they survived the conflict and maybe became a relatively famous politician thereafter.
Basically recounts the turnaround in U.S. fortunes at the Battle of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific in 1942-1943. The Americans had invaded the island but were coming under increasing pressure from the Japanese. In case you don’t know your Second World War history, this was the first major American land offensive following Pearl Harbor. Though the Americans had thwarted the Japanese at The Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway, these were nautical triumphs. Guadalcanal was the first objective in the American island-hopping strategy.
Here, I’m getting all information-overload myself, because all you really need to know is that the Americans parachuted in (actually, he landed by flying boat) Admiral “Bull” Halsey (James Cagney) at a critical moment to revitalize their operation and prevent the expected Japanese attack. The Japanese were so convinced that victory was imminent that they had drawn up operational details of the surrender ceremony they planned to impose on the vanquished Americans.
The Yanks managed to intercept and decode Japanese radio transmissions and in the only real dramatic moment, after capturing the surrender document, Halsey pins it to a tree so his troops can read it and stiffen their resolve.
But mostly this is a bunch of guys in a bunch of rooms talking about what they were going to do and how difficult, what with lack of support and casualties and low morale, their challenge was going to be. There’s no shortage of detail but every time a scene starts to become dramatically interesting up pops our resident voiceover (director and co-star Robert Montgomery if you want to know) to provide us with some unnecessary detail about some character in the room.
On the debit side, this is pretty irritating. On the plus side, it’s fascinating, a potted history of various personnel without having to resort to the usual sub-plots, often inane in themselves, often of the romantic persuasion, that crop up in an otherwise intriguing war picture so as to provide the audience with people to root for. If you were American, you would recognise some of the characters depicted, some true-life heroes (ace pilots, courageous soldiers) who made their name on the field of battle or contributed to the victory off it.
Of course, if you’re from anywhere else you won’t have a clue who anybody is – and not that much interested either, preferring the old-fashioned approach of sub-plot and romance – but stick with it because, once you realize this is a determinedly novel approach for the genre, it does become pretty interesting especially as Cagney, despite his character being nicknamed “Bull,” dispenses with his usual acting tricks, the strangulated voice and the aggressive demeanor, in favor of a more rounded personality.
Nobody tends to hold up a critical mirror to battles that end in victory, unlike Pearl Harbor, so it’s never going to degenerate into verbal fisticuffs, and much of the pressure the audience might detect comes from the other side, the cocky Japanese, who are presented in a very even-handed manner, despite, or perhaps because, their leader Admiral Yamamoto (James T. Goto), who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, was highly respected by the Americans. This is where maybe Violent City (1970) got the idea of ignoring subtitles, but at least here we can rely on Mr Voiceover to keep us posted on what the Japanese were actual up to.
Cagney holds it all together and you might spot Dennis Weaver (Duel, 1971) and Richard Jaeckal (The Dirty Dozen, 1967) among the supporting cast. Sixth and final directorial outing for star Robert Montgomery (though he limits his onscreen involvement here to just the narration) who had experimented with voiceover in Lady in the Lake (1945). Whether you fall in with his take on this one, he pretty much delivers what he intended, a semi-documentary account of leaders in battle. Screenplay by Beirne Lay Jr (The Young and the Brave, 1963) and Frank D. Gilroy (The Subject Was Roses, 1968).
Will Henry’s 1964 source novel was, by today’s standards, a slim volume. The principal idea of Mackenna being given a map by a dying Indian comes from the book, as does the capture of the white woman (named Francie in the novel), and the surprisingly erotic description of Hesh-Ke’s attempted seduction of Mackenna in the pool, the Apache mysticism, and, equally surprisingly, the earthquake denouement.
Some white men do join the party, but they are of rougher stock, the “Good Men” of Hadleyburg entirely producer Carl Foreman’s invention. Foreman turned Mackenna into a lawman rather than just a prospector, made the map more tangible (in the book it was drawn in the sand), gave Mackenna a past with Hesh-Ke and with the outlaw Colorado (named Pelon in the book), and, just as Sergio Leone did with Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West, realized that a handsome attractive villain was far more interesting than the “jug-eared, ugly man” described in Henry’s book.
First edition cover.
Foreman made Tibbs a sergeant and added 20 years to the raw-boned youngster of the book. But in the original, Hesh-Ke was killed, accidentally, just after the pool incident, and it was another of the outlaws, Hachita, who killed Colorado so that the climactic fight on the ledge was between the axe-wielding Hachita and the unarmed Mackenna rather than between Mackenna and Colorado, but Henry had the woman taken hostage kill the Indian.
The various shoot-outs and chases are primarily a Foreman invention. He gives Mackenna more depth, and the vices of gambling and alcohol. Most important of all, it was Foreman who added the visual grandeur. There is no Shaking Rock in the source material, and no waiting for sunrise or for a shadow to point the way to the entrance to the canyon.
A writer-producer was the worst kind of hyphenate as far as a director was concerned in that, as suggested previously, the producer might be more apt to protect his original vision and dialog than adapt the screenplay, which is always only ever intended as a blueprint, to other ideas as the movie went into production.
The opening of the picture is pure Foreman, on a par with the introductory section of The Guns of Navarone, and the extensive use of narration ran counter to a director who felt the camera should tell the story. The greed aspect is spelled out well enough in the original novel, and comparisons with the classic examination of how gold turns men inside out was portrayed best as far as most people were concerned in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) so quite why Foreman felt obliged to hammer the point home so obviously in Mackenna’s Gold is anybody’s guess, except that the producer saw himself as a man with a message, the anti-war themes of The Guns of Navarone (1961) and The Victors (1964) having eliciting critical approval. You get the impression the original novel didn’t require as much tampering as this to be turned into a more than adequate picture.
Will Henry was a pseudonym, one of two he used for writing westerns, the other being Clay Fisher. His real name was Henry Wilson Allen and he began in the movies, joining MGM in 1937 as a screenwriter for cartoon shorts. He also wrote screenplays for cartoon shorts under the pen names Heck Allen and Henry Allen. Many of these were Tex Avery cartoons written between 1944 and 1955 which were considered some of the funniest ever made. He also worked on Woody Woodpecker and other cartoon characters. When he started writing novels in the 1950s he did so under a pseudonym to avoid attracting unwanted attention from his studio employers. He was a five-time winner of The Spur Award including for From Where the Sun NowStands (1960) – which also won The Saddleman Award – and The Gates of the Mountains (1963).
Westerns made from his novels were Santa Fe Passage (1955) starring John Payne, The Tall Men (1955) directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Clark Gable and Jane Russell, Pillars of the Sky (1956) starring Jeff Chandler, and Yellowstone Kelly (1959) starring Clint Walker. At the same time as Mackenna’s Gold was sold, his 1960 book Journey to Shiloh was being set up under the title Fields of Honor to be directed by veteran Mervyn LeRoy and when this fell through was made into a film under the original title in 1969 with newcomer James Caan while Who Rides with Wyatt would be released as Young Billy Young starring Robert Mitchum in fall 1969.
I should mention the George Lucas connection right away because, for some, that is the movie’s main contemporary connection.
Mackenna’s Gold was originally intended as a three-hour movie[i] for roadshow release to be shot in early 1966 for Columbia Pictures by writer-producer Carl Foreman (Guns of Navarone, 1961) who would also be in the director’s chair.[ii] But outside of How the West Was Won (1962) westerns had foundered in roadshow. The Alamo (1960), John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964) and John Sturges The Hallelujah Trail (1965) were surprising roadshow flops. Foreman persuaded Columbia to increase the budget to $5 million – and then beyond – and film the movie in Cinerama, (over 25 percent of the budget was allocated to Cinerama to license the name and use the equipment – $1.35 million in total of initial negative costs[iii]).
In January 1967 Columbia launched the marketing campaign with full page advertisements in the trade papers promoting the fact that the movie would be filmed on location in the USA in Cinerama and that it would bring together the “creators of The Guns of Navarone,” meaning, at this point, Foreman and director J. Lee Thompson. The advertisement also highlighted author Will Henry, on whose novel the film was based (as the “author of San Juan Hill and From Where the Sun Now Stands”) and plugged the book as “a novel of Apache gold and Apache revenge based on the search for the fabulous Lost Adams Diggings.” By the following year, Foreman’s star was in the ascendant after the Parisian revival of High Noon[iv] and Columbia had another two major roadshows planned for the 1968-1969 season: Barbra Streisand’s movie debut in William Wyler’s Funny Girl also starring Omar Sharif and Carol Reed’s Oliver![v]
By this time, Columbia had reshaped its marketing effort to provide the specialist support required for promoting roadshows. In early 1967, it had poached sales guru Leo Greenfield from Buena Vista with the express aim of setting up an effective unit to market hard-ticket product – “first assignment Mackenna’s Gold, Oliver! and Funny Girl”[vi] – to the record number of Cinerama theaters[vii] and those desperate to accommodate roadshow. By the end of 1968, both Cinerama and Columbia had reported record revenues and profits, the former turning a $290,000 loss into a $679,000 profit,[viii] the latter on an unprecedented streak of success with a gross profit of $9.3 million profit on a gross income of $239 million.[ix] Columbia soon added another roadshow prospect to its slate, Sydney Pollack’s World War Two drama Castle Keep starring Burt Lancaster, and was so confident about the two non-musicals, for example, that it expected the western and the war picture to run consecutively from late spring 1969 well into the following year at Loews Hollywood in Los Angeles.[x]Funny Girl hit $550,000 in advance sales – $80,000 was the usual figure.[xi]Mackennas’s Gold’s was scheduled to premiere in Phoenix, Arizona, on February 15, 1969, with the roadshow launch set for the DeMille theater in New York five days later.
Within the next month, however, the world premiere was called off, work began on editing down the near-three-hour running time, and plans, two years in the making, for an ambitious roadshow release were quietly dropped. Public reaction to The Stalking Moon – also starring Gregory Peck – was one reason. Two other Cinerama movies, Custer of the West (1967) and Krakatoa – East of Java (1968) had also flopped. If Mackenna’s Gold was to be marketed as a drama in a western setting rather than a shoot-out in the tradition of 100 Rifles, then Columbia looked worryingly at Isadora, boasting a 177-minutes running time, whose roadshow run in Los Angeles was swiftly truncated, and the movie butchered in a bid to find an audience.[xii]
The studio took a different tack. The world premiere shifted to Munich, West Germany, in March[xiii] with most of the rest of the European capitals holding gala premieres (and running it as roadshow or at least 70mm) before the picture made its U.S. debut in Phoenix on May 10. But the picture unveiled in Phoenix was a ghost of the original. The running time technically came in at 128 minutes, but, in effect, was under two hours long, the introductory narration lasting eight minutes and the end credits accounting for further time. However, what was oddest of all was the 18-month gap between completion and world premiere. Filming had begun on May 16, 1967 and wrapped on September 29. Columbia had shelved one of its biggest budgeted movies for nearly 15 months.
The movie had a troubled history. For a start, Foreman didn’t own the rights to the Will Henry source novel. Dmitri Tiomkin, after a debilitating eye condition restricting his composing career, had in 1964 purchased the rights. Tiomkin agreed to sell the rights to Foreman in April 1965 in return not just for a fee and an agreement to compose the music[xiv] but also the vital producer’s credit necessary to launch him on a new career.[xv] Foreman was initially keen on filming the movie in Spain to take advantage of generous government subsidies.[xvi] But Foreman was demoted from director. His last picture as writer-producer-director The Victors (1964) had flopped. The studio did not want to offer the producer any distraction from the complex logistics of a location shoot where much of the time the crew would be 50 miles from the nearest town and where, despite the desert environment, could be subject to storms and flash floods. Instead, J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone) came on board as director. (Thompson was also at this point lined up to direct Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes, whose rights he co-owned.)
However, the Thompson-Foreman relationship did not run smoothly. Foreman recalled: ‘I was not very happy with the work of J. Lee Thompson on that film and entirely apart from that we still got into trouble in terms of scheduling and so forth and our relationship was always a problem.’[xvii] Logistics were always going to be an issue on a picture of this scale, shot almost exclusively on some of the most inhospitable places on Earth. The buzzard section was filmed in Monument Valley on the Arizona/Utah border, and other scenic wildernesses included the Glen Canyon of Utah, Spider Rock in Canon de Schelly in Arizona, Kanab Valley, Sink Valley, the Panguitch Fish Hatchery in Utah, and Medford in Oregon.
Gregory Peck was not first choice for the titular role in Mackenna’s Gold. He only got the part after Steve McQueen and then Clint Eastwood had turned it down[xviii] and even then Peck wavered, only agreeing after pressure from Foreman, and in recognition of their work together on The Guns of Navarone.[xix] Depending on your point of view, Omar Sharif was miscast or cast against type, a matinee idol whose character, in ruthless pursuit of gold, eschewed any element of romance. By the time the movie appeared, Sharif’s marquee appeal had taken a tumble. MGM’s Mayerling and Twentieth Century Fox’s Che had flopped, The Appointment (1969) shelved and Funny Girl’s success rightly attributed to Streisand.
Over the past few years, Telly Savalas had discovered the harsh reality of Hollywood. An Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) had done less for his career than the odious Maggott in The Dirty Dozen (1967) after which he was promptly promoted to third billing on Sol Madrid (1968), western The Scalphunters (1968) and The Assassination Bureau (1968). Although he retained that billing on Mackenna’s Gold, he did not appear until halfway through, suggesting that his role as Sgt Tibbs had been a casualty of the editing needed to reduce the running length. Camilla Sparv had been leading lady in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966), Assignment K (1968), and Nobody Runs Forever (1968). Newmar, a decade older, was best known for playing “Catwoman” in the television series Batman (1966-1967). Foreman had given her the leading female role opposite Zero Mostel in Monsieur Lecoq (1967) but the movie was unfinished, although Newmar still attracted attention after stills from the picture appeared in Playboy magazine. Mackenna’s Gold aimed to set a new standard in the quality of actors in supporting roles – the by now requisite roadshow all-star cast including Edward G. Robinson (The Biggest Bundle of Them All, 1968), twice-Oscar-nominated Lee J. Cobb (Coogan’s Bluff, 1968), Burgess Meredith (Skidoo, 1968), Anthony Quayle (The Guns of Navarone), Oscar nominee Raymond Massey (Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 1941), Keenan Wynn (How the West Was Won) and Ted Cassidy (“Lurch” in The Addams Family television series, 1964-1966).
The George Lucas Connection
In some respects, the involvement of George Lucas (Star Wars) in Mackenna’s Gold has overshadowed that of director J. Lee Thompson. Committed to bringing through a new generation of talent, Foreman had established an internship for the picture. Lucas was one of four winners and his entry was the first version of THX 1138 (1971). The internship funded the winners to shoot a short film on the location. Foreman became immediately a fan because of the quality of Lucas’s effort. Foreman explained: “He did the shortest one of the lot and the most technically accomplished. It ran only one minute and 47 seconds and it had no title – he gave it a date – and then we agreed we’d call it A Desert Poem because he went out on the desert and did a lot of stop-action photography. George really knew his camera and he played with his camera and it was around and about the film – he was doing the desert more than anything else but in the desert was the film company with its parasols and all that shimmering in the distance and he played around with little things where the sun was shining and the film company was working. And then it began to rain, and it rained like hell, and then the sun came out again. It was awfully good. He did a lot of trick stuff with his camera and that’s what the boys resented, that he could just go out by himself and do that.”[xx]
The “boys” resented Lucas for more than his technical accomplishment but Foreman’s admiration for the neophyte director increased after seeing a display of professionalism that put the other professionals to shame. “We were…in a very difficult location…near the place where we had painted in this great seam of gold…We got to the big scene, the scene where they (the actors) all discovered it (the gold), and they all started running towards it…But it (the location) was in a kind of ravine and there was a problem about the light – you could only shoot it…at that time of year when the sun was more or less directly overhead or had just begun to go down or had just passed the meridian…(but when Foreman arrived on location) the entire company was just sitting there. Lucas therefore pointed out in an indirect manner that the scene had not been rehearsed because J. Lee Thompson was waiting for the sun to rehearse it during the precious moments when the sun was there instead of being ready for when the sun was there.”[xxi]
Reception
Trade magazine Variety came out in overall favor of Mackenna’s Gold: “splendid western, stars plus special effects and grandeur should insure box office success.”[xxii]Hollywood Reporter predicted, “Audiences should queue up,” and Film Daily proclaimed “a fine, exciting western adventure.”[xxiii] However, Vincent Canby in the New York Times called it a “truly stunning absurdity,” The New York News, while generally positive, nonetheless complained it was “sprawling” and “pretentious.” New York magazine and the Washington Post were among the nay-sayers.[xxiv] Perhaps, Peck’s own opinion was the most damning: “Mackenna’s Gold was a terrible western, just wretched.”[xxv]
Star fatigue did not occur in the days of the studio system, when releases were carefully spaced out to give the public a breathing space between each release. Actor independence meant timing of releases was removed from studio control – Gregory Peck’s movies in 1969 came from three different studios, Universal (The Stalking Moon), Twentieth Century Fox (The Chairman) and Columbia (Mackenna’s Gold), and Omar Sharif was in the same position with MGM for Mayerling, Twentieth Century Fox for Che and the western from Columbia. As you might expect, releases were not coordinated, studios did not sit down around a table and discuss how to avoid each other’s movies clashing. So in the first six months of 1969 audiences were treated to three pictures apiece from the stars, the earlier ones flops though Mayerlingr was a big hit overseas.[xxvi] Whatever the reason, Mackenna’s Gold did not race out of the gate. Its final rentals tally of $3.1 million – 42nd spot in the annual chart,[xxvii] ahead of The Stalking Moon and Once Upon a Time in the West, but well below the much less expensive Support Your Local Sheriff and 100 Rifles. In budget terms it was close to a disaster. However, it was a huge hit in India, setting a record in Madras for the best showing for a foreign picture.[xxviii]
SOURCES:
This is an edited version of a much longer chapter from my book, The Gunslingers of ’69: Western Movies’ Greatest Year.
[i] Sheldon Hall has argued that the movie was never intended to be three hours long and that judging from a screenplay of 145 pages the film would have been roughly two-and-half-hours long. He identified a major sequence that was filmed but edited out – of another battle between the Apaches and the gold-seekers (“Film in Focus, Mackenna’s Gold,” Cinema Retro, Issue 43, 40.)
[ii] “Foreman to Start Gold, Delays Churchill Pic,” Variety, September 8, 1965, 4. The Churchill project would eventually become Young Winston made in 1972 for Columbia. The movie was originally postponed due to political unrest in the chosen movie locations.
[iii] Filmmakers licensing the Cinerama name had to pay $500,000 upfront and Foreman was committed to spend $875,000 for Cinerama camera equipment. The cost might escalate because Columbia also had to agree to pay Cinerama 10 percent of the gross (“C’rama Sets Major Int’l Expansion As More Pix, More Theaters Use Process,” Variety, November 15, 1967, 25).
[iv] “Junket for Noon Sparks Nostalgia,” Variety, April 24, 1968, 31. Not only was the revival a critical success but it was a box office hit all over again in Paris.
[v] “Leo Greenfield’s Chore,” Variety, May 31, 1967, 8. Wyler, of course, was the king of the roadshow, having directed Ben Hur. Reed had directed The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) after an initial chastening experience with roadshow having pulled out of MGM’s Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after clashing with star Marlon Brando.
[xii] “Switching of Isadora,,” Variety. The film, which had opened on December 18, was set to close on February 8 and go straight into continuous performance.
[xiii] “Col Bows Gold in Munich to Spark Lagging Box Office,” Variety, March 26, 1969, 41; “Mackenna’s Gold Launching Pattern,” Variety, March 5, 1969, 28. While it was true the studios were concerned about falling box office in Europe, the true reason for launching the picture in Europe ahead of America was because Foreman was so much better known there courtesy of his major marketing blitz for The Guns of Navarone and The Victors. It opened in Paris and Rome in March and in April in London.
[xiv] By the time the movie came out, Tiomkin had given up composing and the score was done by Quincy Jones.
[xv] “Tiomkin-Foreman Partners for Col,” Variety, April 21, 1965, 19.
[xvii]The Carl Foreman Tapes, Transcripts of Tapes between Sidney Cohn and Carl Foreman, Carl Foreman Collection, ITM – 4408, (Tape V – A, December 20, 1977, British Film Institute, Reubens Library, London).
[xviii] Avery, Kevin ed, Conversations with Clint, Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 35 ; Neibaur, James L, The Clint Eastwood Westerns, 44.
[xix] Fishgall, Gary, Gregory Peck, A Biography (Scribner, New York, 2002), 264.
The Magnificent 60s 