Four Rode Out (1969)

Must See Movie...

Highly Overrated But Still Good

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

"Four Rode Out" could have been titled, "Four Walked Out,"since the quartet of characters spent most of their time on foot. The horses were done with one by one in scenes that looked almost too real.It is, to say the least, a very stark movie - slow-moving, yes, but constantly engrossing. The clown critics who gave it one star were probably affected by the hot desert sun coming through their screens, affecting their minds. Whoops - almost said brains.As to the acting. Young Mateos as the b.f. was convincing. Sue Lyon, accused by one critic as over-acting, was quite good handling a rather complex character, one almost as naive as Lolita. (Had to get that in).Leslie Neilsen sandwiched between his early near-fame days, to steering the Poseidon into near oblivion, to good-sized stardom, seemed to have a blast as a baddie - a real baddie.Pernell Roberts, Bonanza's maverick, was excellent portraying a very questionable character.The silent ending wrapped the story beautifully. The minus was Janis Ian's contribution - totally unnecessary, totally dull.The rest of the music was justifiably sparse. For a change, it did not blast out at you.All in all, "Four Rode Out" is worthwhile. Fie on the naysayers. Give it a chance. It is sometimes frighteningly captivating.

The movie is slow paced, but for the most part, flows smoothly. Anyone who has traveled the desert, on foot, will surely sympathize with the characters and feel right at home with the slow pace.I felt the problems were more with the indoor scenes, at the beginning, than in the later outdoor scenes. Much of the indoor filming is jerky and poorly framed. The scenes in the rooms had the camera in the actor's faces and should have been farther back, giving the actors the room needed to move around and express themselves. This would be easy on a sound stage, so I suspect the scenes were filmed in actual rooms, where space is limited.Likewise, the 60's music detracts from the film - dating it, when, if it had used a more traditional style of music, it could have been a timeless classic...The acting on the whole is good and the characters fill out as the movie progresses.There are a few annoying audio blips, as if some of the dialog was cut or bleeped.

Four Rode Out is a European western to be sure not made in Italy so it does not rate being called a spaghetti western. It was made on the plains of Spain in the dry season as you'll see by the landscape. The same plains where the armies of Napoleon and Wellington rode back and forth upon.For a Spanish made production, three Americans were brought over to star in this essentially four person soap opera, Pernell Roberts late of Bonanza who plays a US Marshal on the trail of bandit Julian Mateos who has just robbed a bank where a guard was killed. Mateos not wanting to leave without a little nookie from girl friend Sue Lyon also accidentally kills her father in self defense when the old man caught Sue and Julian in the act. The third American is Leslie Nielsen, a really grungy character who is a Pinkerton man interested in recovering the money and the bounty on Mateos' head. He declares himself as accompanying Roberts on the hunt and Lyons follows them both to make sure her man is taken while he still has a pulse.Acting honors such as they are belong to Nielsen who turns out to be a far more loathsome character than even the viewer thinks when first meeting him. There's not much traditional western action after Mateos is taken alive no thanks to Nielsen. But on the way back the flaws come out in all the characters.Four Rode Out might have been better in American hands with folks who know what the western genre is all about. As it is it becomes more of a soap opera than a horse opera, not a recipe for western fans to like.

I kind of liked this slow-moving western, filmed in Spain's Almeria region. Technically this is a spaghetti western, a USA-Spain co-production, although only the location and one of the stars have any sort of Euro-Western pedigree. The music, by Janice Ian, is about as far from Ennio Morricone as you can get, although some of the banjo plunking is appropriate. Pernell Roberts is very good as the Marshal, after fugitive Julian Mateos (THE HELLBENDERS, RETURN OF THE SEVEN) who robbed a bank during which a teller was killed. Along for the ride are slimy Pinkerton man Brown played by Leslie Nielsen in a rare villainous role, and lovely Sue Lyon as Mateos' fiancé, who wants to see him brought in alive. They ride and ride, then ride some more, and finally pause for a brief action scene, then ride back the way they came, but now they're low on water. It takes patience to watch, but the actors keep our interest, and I was pleased by the ending. As half of a dollar DVD I felt my fifty cents was pretty well spent. Two puzzles though, all the listings for this flick say 1971 but the titles at the end claim 1968. I tend to believe the titles. Also, the version I saw bleeped the word whore when it was spoken, several times in the first few minutes. I wonder why?