The Bravados (1958)

Brilliant and touching

Absolutely Fantastic

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

"The Bravados" is a Western story of crime, revenge, justice, wrongs, love lost and regained, and redemption. It's based on a novel by Frank O'Rourke. Peck plays Jim Douglass, who is pursuing the killers of his wife. He arrives in a town in which four outlaws he has been trailing for six months are in jail and awaiting hanging the next day. To say more about the plot would take away some of the power of the story. Suffice it to say that the movie has some surprises, and various characters that fit in Douglass's life before. It has a fine supporting cast including Joan Collins, Stephen Boyd, Albert Salmi, Henry Silva, Lee Van Cleef, Andrew Duggan and more. Gregory Peck may have played more roles of characters with soul and/or in conflict than any other actor. All were excellent. He received an Academy award nomination for only his second film in which he played a missionary priest in "The Keys of the Kingdom" of 1944. In 1947 he played a journalist who pretends to be Jewish to experience and then expose the prejudice of anti-Semitism in areas of New England, especially among the blue bloods. In "Twelve O'Clock High" of 1949 he is an Army Air Force officer during WW II. He plays an ex-soldier in "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" of 1956 who struggles with his past. He plays a Southern attorney in the 1962 film, "To Kill a Mockingbird," for which he won the best actor Oscar. A number of his other films have morality and ethical themes and struggles. This Western movie, "The Bravados" of 1958, is an exceptional film in that category. It belongs in any library of Western films.

I enjoyed this movie. The plot was interesting. But. Yes, there is a "but."Many strange things happened in this movie, like, why exactly a posse couldn't take care of an outlaw by themselves. They even let the outlaw ride away to get back to his friends. I will not complain about any other plot holes because there have been other reviewers pointing them out already. What's really bugging me is the romance between Jim and Josefa. I knew they were ex-couple. But Jim was supposed to be a mourning husband, trying to avenge his wife's death. He said he still loved her. He rode 100 miles hunting these men for six months! But at the end of the movie, Jim seemed to accept Josefa as his new girlfriend easily. Dead wife forgotten.Josefa was strange too. She wanted Jim. She knew Jim was married but she flirted with him anyway. After knowing about his wife's tragedy, she still tried to get closer to him. She wanted to go to his ranch right away. She said she'd take care of his daughter as if the girl was "her own" and then she kissed him right in front of Jim's daughter. It appeared to me that the woman was down right shameless. And Jim accepting her made him a lesser man than when he firstly rode into the town.The relationship grew too fast it was groundless, meaningless and made the story worse. Many western movies made the same mistake.

While Gregory Peck is not the mean outlaw he is in "Duel in the Sun", he is, however, a low-keyed yet mean, cold man who is going to wage an all-out, one-man war against the four men who he knows have killed his wife. Peck does well in the role of Jeff Douglas, the cold, vindictive man who will stop at nothing to accomplish his own purpose. Joan Collins is a very pretty, sweet, caring friend Josefa. Andrew Duggan in one of his few decent roles is convincing as a priest. Stephen Boyd, Henry Silva, Albert Salmi, and Lee Van Cleef are four of the "meanest" men who have ever lived: they definitely portray their roles to a tee. Because of all that I like in a western-beautiful rustic scenery, good action, and actors portraying their characters well, I think this western has not received the acclaim it, I fell, justly deserves.

I'm not sure the title makes much sense. "The Bravados." I guess you can have a couple of people called the bravados in the same way that you can have desperadoes, but while people can be collectively desperate, few collectivities would exhibit "bravado," which means "boldness intended to impress or intimidate." Certainly nobody in this movies does. I take it that someone was assigned the task of coming up with a properly Western-sounding title and said, "Well, what the hell. It's better than 'The Guns of Darkness'." In the quiet little Western town of Rio Arriba or whatever it is, four men are to be hanged in the morning for felony murder -- the rapacious Steven Boyd, the bullock-like Albert Salmi, the nervous and ratty Lee Van Cleef, and the canny Indian, Henry Silva. Into the town rides the mysterious figure of Gregory Peck, looking grim and determined, waiting for the hanging.But it never happens! The four felons escape, taking a pretty young woman hostage. The posse takes off after them, except for Peck, the most resolved of the hunters, who -- knowing that they will hold the posse off at the pass until daylight -- goes to sleep in his hotel room, ready for a fresh start with a rested horse in the morning.That's the first hint of John Ford's "The Searchers," which appeared two years earlier. Both are revenge Westerns in which the protagonist will simply not be put off but keeps coming, filled with hatred, only to find at the end that his rage has misled him."The Searchers" is a superior film, more subtle in many ways, more fully fleshed out with character and humor, but "The Bravados" is a rattling good tale too. You will never be bored.The excitement is due chiefly to some of the performances and to the direction and the plot takes some of the sheen from Peck's usually unimpeachable rectitude. He catches up with the four men, one by one. The first is Van Cleef. When Peck disarms him and has him on his knees, he shows Van Cleef a photo of his wife, whom he claims Van Cleef and the rest raped and killed at his ranch. Van Cleef, in one of his best scenes, confesses to past crimes but insists he's never seen Peck's wife. He begs for his life. In return, Peck kicks him in the face once or twice and shoots him in the back of the head. We don't know what Peck does to the next miscreant, Salmi, but it was probably pretty savage. The posse find Salmi hanging by his feet from a tree. The third man, Boyd, is shot in the chest before he has a chance to draw his pistol. No doubt Boyd deserved it. He has a "weakness" for women. When left alone with the sexy hostage, he turns utterly slimy, feeling the hem of her long dress and petticoats and beginning his planned assault by asking, "Is that silk?" The Indian's case is a little more complicated and it requires Peck to register first disbelief, then guilt. He handles it okay. It's well within his range as an actor.Henry King directed it and did a good job too. The movie lacks a sense of place though. Lots of Mexicans around -- this is only a two- or three-day ride from the border -- but otherwise the settings are generic and functional. Rio Arriba is a typical dusty town with a hotel, an adjoining saloon, a jail house, a mercantile store, and a great big church. That's it for the community. Oh, Joan Collins is around mainly to provide Peck with a substitute for his ravaged wife, and when she goes to church she's given one of those tall black mantillas that come from Spain. Her performance is less than convincing. The script and performances, however, nicely individualize the four escapees. The locations -- around Jalisco and in Michoacan, where my barber and guru Luis comes from -- are pretty without being distinctive: rolling hills of pine forest with jagged sawtooth mountains on the horizon. Some clichés are avoided. Nobody's life depends on a fast draw, and when we first see Peck's little daughter she looks like an unkempt street urchin. Some clichés are eagerly welcomed. Peck removes his hat after riding a hundred miles and his 1950s haircut looks freshly done and moussed by the studio barber. He is clean shaven -- and I mean void of any hint of stubble.I swear that, at times, some of the incidents are so nearly original that I began to wonder if maybe Henry King hadn't caught them by mistake or maybe the editor had chosen the wrong take. When Peck confronts Boyd in the Mexican cantina, for instance, we don't expect Peck to interrupt the conversation by suddenly drawing his pistol and firing it -- and neither, it appears, does Boyd the actor. He looks surprised, as if a mistake had been made. A less imaginative director would have handled it much differently.