The Wonderful Country (1959)

People are voting emotionally.

Best movie ever!

Awesome Movie

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Nursed back to health from a broken leg by the residents of a small US town, an American-born illegal arms dealer becomes torn between whether to return to Mexico, where he has lived most of his life, or stay on in America in this Technicolor western starring Robert Mitchum. As it turns out, Mitchum has quite some history, residing in Mexico to avoid being arrested for avenging his father's murder, yet with so many welcoming him with open arms, offering him jobs and declaring that he should stay "this side of the river... where you belong", Mitchum soon finds himself in quite a dilemma. The title is intentionally ambiguous; it is never clear whether the USA or Mexico is meant to be the wonderful place. The plot is not really helped though by the inclusion of Julie London as a love interest in the town. She is married and it is hard to root for Mitchum when he convinces her that she must not really love her husband on account of a few glances. London is pretty dull too, and then as a self-defense incident forces Mitchum to make up his mind between the US and Mexico, it feels a case of too much being thrown on the plate here. The film's best moments are the quieter ones in which Mitchum sits and genuinely ponders over which side to join. There are enough of these moments to keep the film chugging along, but it is a little hard to enthusiastically recommend it.

This is a film for those who wish to understand the Mitchum mystique. I first saw this film with my father when Bill Kennedy was still on Channel Nine in Canada. It has something for everyone; even the dignified and yet realistic presence of Leroy 'Satchel Page' as Buffalo Soldier Tobe Sutton. It's about a tough guy who finds himself vulnerable at all the wrong times and reluctantly must depend on the care of others when he least expects it.Some men, like Clint Eastwood of the Mount Rushmore School and more famously, Marlon Brando, are great at understatement and know how to make it work for them. Mitchum, with his sleepy-eyed 'I'm just here to get my paycheck' attitude is at the top of this heap. He does his job, no more or less, but that is what makes him such a great working-class hero. Mitchum does his job, and every once in awhile, like Bettie Page or Ernest Hemingway, he will flash you a little something extra. No charge. It's on the house.I first saw this film in black and white and later in color. I was surprised to find my appreciation of it has grown over the years and it does not seem a bit dated. It's a simple story, really, with about the complexity of a good short story. The intriguing thing is I cannot tell you why exactly it has stuck in my mind with such fondness. That in itself suggests a touch of great artistry.Alex North conducts a rousing score that suggests the best of Mexican music. The cinematography by Floyd Crosby and Alex Phillips seems even more appealing in color than it was in black and white when I viewed it again with my cousin James Arthur. It's a man's movie with a bit less romance than Bogart's THE LEFT HAND OF GOD, but every time I see it the movie seems to be spot on in all the right places. There is nothing baroque about the presentation of events and the story never props itself up on anything bordering sensationalism. Like Mitchum's acting, it is what it is, take it or leave it.But I think you will take it in the end. This movie has one of the best resolutions I have ever seen in a Western. After the last gunfight, you KNOW this chaos and nonsense in violence has come to an end the way a baseball game concludes with a walk off home run and Mitchum giving a clinic on how to put a bullet through the impulse to break out into tears with classic manly disconnection as one of the great natural actors of our time. I have seen this ending several times over the years and like the ending to '2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY', cannot tell you exactly why it is so poignant to me. Besides the treat of seeing the Baseball legend Satchel Paige in a movie and Julie London being easy on the eyes, and a host of venerable Latinos being sympathetically cast in supporting roles or as villains with sneering machismo, there is Mitchum swaggering through with that 'I don't give a damn' disinterest finally giving a damn at the end without saying a word.

This movie was more accurate then I think people know. There was a troop of black army cavalry in Arizona and they did comport them selves very well. The film was filmed in Arizona which is breath taking and not in Texas which is OK. Robert Mitchem was at his best in this type of roll. I loved him when he played a roll of the under played good guy. Julie London should have sung a song in it but of course she couldn't. The film had a very good story line and moved along which I find films in this day and age don't. I'm wondering if the film had any historic background to it. It would seem that back in the day when it should have taken place there would have been a person like Mr. Brady.

The Wonderful Country finds Robert Mitchum as a gunslinger, a pistolero working for the local Mexican governor Pedro Armendariz. He had to flee Texas years ago after a shooting and Armendariz gave him shelter and work. Despite that Mitchum is sent across the border on a gun buying trip. Unfortunately he takes a bad fall from a horse and winds up with a broken leg. While on the mend in that bordertown and after, Mitchum finds himself in a series of situations that call him to question what he's been doing and just where he can call home.One of those situations is Julie London, wife of army major Gary Merrill who's got a bit of a past herself. She throws quite a few complications in Mitchum's past.The Wonderful Country is a nicely put together western shot on location in Durango. It was one of the first westerns to use that town in Mexico, a whole lot more in the sixties would follow. Besides those already mentioned the performances to watch for in this film are those of Charles McGraw as the frontier doctor and that of Satchel Paige as the cavalry sergeant. A year later John Ford would come out with Sergeant Rutledge about a black cavalry sergeant and the men around him, but I do believe that baseball immortal Satchel Paige was the first in Hollywood to portray a black cavalry man in a major motion picture.McGraw is something else. He's the doctor who tends to Mitchum's broken leg and befriends him, but then gets one big pang of jealousy about Julie London that leads to tragedy. In real life McGraw was as much the hellraiser as he is in the film.The Wonderful Country had the good fortune to be partially scripted by Tom Lea so his vision of the characters in his own novel remained pretty much intact. This was the only one of two novels by that writer/artist to be filmed.That's as good a reason as any to see a very fine western.