![]() ![]() And Erin will betray anyone to make sure he gets the biggest cut.īut according to the opening title card, some of the mercenaries “came alone.” One such is Benjamin Trane (Gary Cooper) of Louisiana, formerly of the Confederate Army and now a man without a cause except survival. Erin and his band-which amazingly includes Jack Elam, Ernest Borgnine, and Charlie Bronson-hire out to whoever pays them the most. This means French villains in a US Western-nothing like vile European colonialism inserted into the North American frontier! It also means sequences in royal palaces crammed with genuine Old World aristocratic splendor, which makes a thuggish lout like Burt Lancaster’s Joe Erin that much more entertaining.Įrin is one of the American fortune-seekers who have traveled south of the border to hire out in the conflict between the French-controlled Mexican government under Emperor Maximilian (George Macready, Paths of Glory ) and the Juarista freedom fighters. The historical backdrop is the later years of the French intervention in Mexico and Benito Juárez’s Republican revolt against it, circa 1866. Gary Cooper’s character keeps threatening to switch to syrupy idealism-he certainly has a Southern gentleman feeling buried in him-but the script never lets that sort of sentiment get the better of it. Vera Cruz is a rough film that avoids the maudlin and the idealist. ![]() Its amoral attitude also makes it easy for contemporary audiences to enjoy now. But it was a success with audiences and assured the career of Robert Aldrich ( The Dirty Dozen ) as a tough-guy action director. This cynicism and casual violence made the film unpopular with critics at the time. It has great performances from two legendary leading men (Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster), a crackling script, sterling supporting cast (young Charles Bronson acting under his given name of Charles Buchinsky), and a fully loaded magazine of violence and cynicism. Vera Cruz holds up robustly today without having to view it only through the films it influenced. That plot line encapsulates in a single sentence the first half of Sergio Leone’s career, but it wasn’t what audiences expected from a big-budget Western in 1954 What changed was the addition of sneering cynicism and an army of self-interested shady folks double-crossing each other over a gold shipment. It still looks like a 1950s A-List Hollywood Western, with the exception of actual Mexican location shooting. You can imagine Sergio Leone watching this movie and saying, “Hot damn, this is how I wanna make ‘em!” (Sam Peckinpah was watching too The Wild Bunch contains direct visual quotes from this earlier trip down south for trigger-happy gunslingers to shoot up Mexico.) It was also a technical development in film formats: not exactly a tremendous leap forward, but something that placed the wider screen in reach of studios with less cash.īut the visual style of Vera Cruz isn’t what had an impact on the Italian Western. Probably no single US Western had more influence on the Italian revision of the genre in the 1960s than Vera Cruz.
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