User Reviews

20th Century Fox's THE BRAVADOS (1958) is another fine fifties Cinemascope western from the studio's vaults. Coming near the end of the decade it was produced with the usual Fox widescreen expertise that was displayed so well previously with such gems as "Garden Of Evil" (1954), Broken Lance" ('54),"The Tall Men" ('55) and the beautiful "The Last Wagon" (1956). Solidly directed by the ever reliable Henry King it was stunningly photographed by the great Leon Shamroy in lovely Mexican locations and the splendid screenplay derived from the novel by Frank O'Rourke. Also the initial setting of a border town is remarkably attractive thanks to the splendid Art Direction of Lyle Wheeler and Mark-Lee Kirk.

A brooding unsmiling Gregory Peck is Jim Douglas who arrives in the small town of Rio Arriba after a long ride to attend the hanging of four outlaws ("you rode over a 100 miles just to see a hanging?" the Sheriff asks.). Douglas believes the four are responsible for the rape and murder of his wife and is here to bear witness to their execution. But when they escape from the local jail - taking a young female hostage (Kathleen Gallant) with them - Douglas sets out after them in a relentless pursuit ("I've been after them for six months - I'm not going to lose them now") and eventually arbitrarily kills each of them one by one except for the last who proves to him that the four could not have murdered his wife after all. Peck is superb! He gives one of his strongest ever performances. The fury in his eyes and the all consuming hatred and desire for vengeance is powerfully palpable in his gritted teeth portrayal. Others in the cast are good too. The ill-fated Stephen Boyd as the leader of the four ("I have a weakness for women"), the also ill-fated Albert Salmi ("every man is entitled to one weakness - mine's cards"), the nervous half-breed perfectly played by Lee Van Cleef ("please don't kill me! I done some bad things but I never murdered anyone") and a young Henry Silva as the Indian who knows instinctively that Douglas isn't far behind ("He has the eyes of a hunter"). Herbert Rudley too gives a good turn as the Sheriff and in the female lead is British actress Joan Collins who really doesn't have very much to do except look gorgeous. Curiously she plays an unmarried Mexican rancher by the name of Josefa Valarde but her accent is straight out of London's Park Lane. Hmmm!

Nevertheless the whole thing also is perfectly punctuated by a terrific score by Alfred Newman and Hugo Friedhofer. Newman's main theme is a driving and pulsating march theme first heard under the titles over a medium tracking shot of Peck on horseback at full gallop against the night sky. The music splendidly points up and instantly establishes the determination and resolve of the protagonist. Newman also wrote a lovely gentle Mexican guitar cue for the Collins character Josefa which gets a ravishing full orchestral rendition for the finale. Friedhofer contributed to the dramatic scenes, the musical supervision was by Alfred's younger brother Lionel and the orchestra was conducted in Germany by Bernard Kaun.

THE BRAVADOS is an all round enjoyable western and is a favourite among cultists. Not as good as Peck's best western ten years later - "The Stalking Moon" but still a good story of revenge and retribution in a beautiful looking well written well acted and well scored Cinemascope production. Another Fox winner!

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.

"The Bravados" exposed a tragic violation of justice, and a confession of an error from a severe threatening widower (Gregory Peck) entirely blind in chasing four killers who, he believes, raped and murdered his wife... Peck is seen at one time the ruthless judge, jury and executioner...

The entertaining thing about the film is probably the manhunt of the accused men who escape from jail taking with them a female hostage Kathleen Gallant...

Gregory Peck's character as the blind seeker of justice is fit to be despised... With a downbeat climax this sour revenge Western remembered me the persistent Captain Ahab with his determination to finish with the killer whale, performed also by Peck...

Peck has continued to refine the identity of the avenging hero keeping his character alive through the good intervention of his heroic persona...

The four outlaws create a false impression in pretending indifference to misfortune...

"The Bravados" is a dour Western with a downbeat ending... The production is good, but the entertainment uneasy...

Jim Douglass sets off in pursuit of three baddies who, he believes, killed his wife. Does this make him as bad as them, particularly when he has no proof?

Westerns were always a matter of moral certitude, often down to the colour of hats worn and horses ridden: you could tell, by his colour scheme, which side of the law an individual espoused. Then, in the 50s the idea of the anti-hero raised its head - someone who did the right thing for the wrong reason, or the wrong thing for the right reason. Alan Ladd's Shane was one of the earliest contenders, and John Ford/John Wayne's The Searchers was one of the strongest, featuring possibly Wayne's best acting.

Archetypal hero Gregory Peck joins this band of morally compromised protagonists as someone whose fundamental goodness is corrupted by his bitter desire for revenge, to the extent that he loses sight of the fact that he might not actually be right.

Peck's strong central performance anchors the movie. the 3 baddies are satisfactorily bad, and a young Joan Collins is slightly out of her depth as a not-quite-love interest. And, as a colourful widescreen feast of gorgeous scenery, it looks great.

This is a well made revenge yarn starring Gregory Peck as a small Arizona cattle rancher out to avenge the rape and murder of his wife. The bulk of the movie follows him as he leads a posse tracking four suspects attempting to escape to Mexico. This was a well done and compelling drama. I gave it six stars out of 10 in IMDb. It scored 14 points in my IMDb ranking. Both are good scores.

Here were its better points:

• The four villains are played by very good actors: Stephen Boyd, Albert Salmi, Lee Van Cleef and Henry Silva. More importantly, their characters are very well developed. The script manages to create sympathy for them, even though they have few redeeming qualities. Stephen Boyd is excellent and carries the movie on his back.

• The bulk of this movie was filmed on location in a very attractive mountainous area of northern Mexcio. The exciting manhunt takes place against stunning vistas and is accompanied by one of the better musical scores I can remember. I particularly enjoyed the horns, including some intense passages by the orchestra's trombone section.

• I'm not a big Gregory Peck fan, but he was well cast and credible in this role.

• The movie is thematically interesting and complex. I'd rather not discuss in detail, as it would probably give too much of the movie away.

• There were very well developed Mexican themes. This included Mexicans who can actually speak Spanish, if you can believe it. It reminded me of the extended French dialogue among the trappers in Howard Hawk's "The Big Sky".

Here's what kept the movie from being better:

• Joan Collins comes close to sinking the whole ship as the gratuitous romantic lead.

• Boyd's character should have had more screen time. I would like to have seen the outlaw group limited to just Silva and Boyd. His malevolent charisma was great counterpoint to Peck's grim, emotionally repressed assassin.

• Peck is a cattle rancher. They should have explained why he is such an effective and experienced manhunter.

• I found the presence of a 100% Catholic town in 1880's Arizona to be inaccurate. The majority of white settlers at this time were biblical Protestants, who wouldn't have been caught dead attending a Catholic mass. Certainly the town could have had an old Spanish mission and many Catholic Mexican residents who attended it, but I didn't see any Mexicans in the town. The congregants all appeared to be white. This was probably just Hollywood once again displaying its total ignorance of Christianity.

SPOILERS BELOW!!!!!!!!!!

• There were a number of other plot holes. For example, Peck's character lives too close to town to appear as a "mysterious stranger". Surely rape/murders weren't so common in the area that the death of his wife hadn't been big news six months earlier. Same thing with the hangman, whom someone should have been able to recognize. At one point, Joan Collins teleports over 100 miles of rough country.

And finally, what is the justification for letting Henry Silva's character go free at the end? He was an accessory to two on screen murders and an the attempted murder of a sheriff. And let's not forget he had already been convicted and sentenced to hang for crimes committed before the movie began. Since the movie is supposedly a celebration of "doing the right thing", this must just be an idiotic mistake.

• Production code rapes were really weird. This one was very similar to the one in "Rancho Notorious". The rapist makes sexually suggestive advances to the victim, the camera cuts away from them, there are a couple of screams from the woman, then the rapist almost immediately runs back on camera. The rape seemingly takes place in about 15 seconds of live time. This isn't a criticism, just an observation.

When Jim Douglas rides into the town of Rio Arriba he is told they don't want any strangers in town till after four criminals are hanged; he states that he has come to see them die and after surrendering his guns he enters town anyway. The sheriff asks him why he wants to see the men hang but receives no answer and when Douglas goes into the jail to see the men none of them recognise him. That night while the town is in church the men are broken out of jail and flee with a young woman as hostage; the sheriff is wounded so his deputy leads a posse after the escapees. In the morning Douglas joins the posse and they track the men as they head for the Mexican border. As they go Douglas manages to corner the bandits one by one and each time shows his captive a picture of a woman; they all claim not to have seen her but he doesn't believe them. Back in town a friend of his, who he hasn't seen for five years learns his story from the town priest; one day Douglas had returned home to find his wife had been raped and murdered; the gang had been identified by a neighbour and Douglas had been after them ever since. When Douglas finally corners the last of the escapees he learns a shocking truth; one that will affect him for the rest of his days.

I've always associated Gregory Peck with the mild mannered lawyer Atticus Finch from 'To Kill a Mockingbird' so it came as a shock to see him playing a character hell bent on seeing four men die; perhaps it is that surprise that made his performance seem so powerful. While Peck's performance carried the film the supporting cast, which included Joan Collins and Lee Van Cleef, did a fine job. The story of a man seeking revenge might be one of the oldest but that doesn't mean it is always cliché; the ending added an excellent twist that I'm sure would have taken me totally by surprise if it hadn't been hinted at on the blurb on the back of the DVD case. With many classic westerns the setting is almost as important as the story and this is no exception; the locations are stunning in a way that makes the action believable. When I sat down to watch this I expected something fairly average but was gripped from start to finish; I'm surprised this film isn't better known as it is a fine example of the genre... if you like Westerns this is a must see.

Gregory Peck does repressed anger and emotion very well. His darting eyes and shifting posture lend tension and drama to the screen. Here in The Bravados' (1958), he uses these techniques to good effect.

A farmer's wife is molested and murdered. Anxious to track the band of killers, he arrives in a town where four desperados are about to be executed. He is prepared to let the law take it's course, even though he is critical of the hanging formalities.

When the four desperados manage to escape, he takes over the lead of the posse. His mercy is the mercy of the gun.

A crucial acting scene is when on his return to town he enters the church. He confesses, on the basis of friendship, to the padre, that the killers he has just dealt with are not those responsible for the murder of his wife. He has a crisis of conscience. Peck's jerky actions suggest the mental hoops he finds himself going through.

The question arises as to how justice is best served. As blind pursuit may lead to false judgements.

However, he becomes a hero to the people of the town for his actions on their behalf, making the land a fit place for decent folks to live.

Feminists might take issue with the leading lady. Just saying they were different times then may not cut ice. A strong man and a doting, albeit independent woman, fall easily into stereotypical categories. She( Joan Collins), also has conflicting opinions on the pursuit of justice

Even so, with an excellent cast, it is a solid piece of film work from director Henry King.

When I read a brief synopsis of this film I thought, oh my, that old plot again? I'm surprised Gregory Peck fell for it. But, it's difficult for me to resist a Gregory Peck film, so I watched it and was pleasantly surprised. Yes, it is another revenge Western, but the script is much better than average, the acting excellent and -- I thought -- realistic, and the settings are often quite stunning.

Let's begin with the plot. How many times have we seen the basic plot? Group of men kill man's wife...he seeks revenge. Well, this story goes a little beyond that basic plot. It involves a lovely village with good people. It involves mistaken identity. It involves a past love. It involves repentance. The only problem I had with the plot was that -- at the end -- there is no need for repentance. The outlaws killed were guilty of attempted murder, one was guilty of rape, another guilty of theft, all were guilty of escaping from jail. They were not innocent...they paid a price.

In terms of the acting, Gregory Peck is marvelous; of course, wasn't he always? The big surprise came with Joan Collins...I guess she could actually act...at least on occasion...and for brief moments. Stephen Boyd was a nasty villain here, and accomplishe dhis acting duty. Albert Salmi was one of the bad guys in a pretty much nothing part. Henry Silva had several very good scenes near the end of the film. Was there some reason that Kathleen Gallant was smiling almost the whole time during her kidnapping. Nice to see Herbert Rudley as the sheriff...a good character actor. Lee Van Cleef, another of the bad guys had one good pre-death scene. Andrew Duggan had one good scene at the end of the film. The oddest casting was Joe DeRita as the fake hangman; DeRita is best known as one of the replacements for Curly in the Three Stooges!

I rarely watch Westerns anymore, but this is a good one. Well worth your time.

Excellent lesson of morale from this western starred by Gregory Peck, who is like a lone ranger trying to kill the supposedly four men who killed his wife. He came from far village to see the execution of these four men by the law, but these were able to get away from the justice. At this point skilled Jim Douglas (Peck) decided to go behind them to make justice by himself. He first killed merciless two of them organizing tricky ambushes, and the third one in the Mexican territory. In all cases Douglas showed the photo of his wife and the bandits always denied they knew her or did anything wrong against her. When these bandits were running away, they arrived in a house of a miner, who was the neighbor of Douglas. This miner tried to escape with his belongings (money) but was killed by one of the bandit. The money of the miner was taken by the fourth member of the gang, a Mexican Indian (Henry Sylva) who ran away to meet her wife and son. Douglas went behind him, but could not kill the Indian because of the help of the Indian's wife. When Douglas recovered the Indian once again told him that he did not know Douglas' wife, but in the meantime Douglas saw his bag (the one taken from the miner)with the money, and asked the Indian how he could deny all this when his bag of money was stolen at that night and was there. The Indian quietly replied that he took it from the miner killed by one of the bandits. Interesting that Douglas when he previously noticed that the miner was killed, he asserted that the miner never did anything wrong against anyone in his life. The film showed that nobody has right to make justice alone, one should know the facts before doing something against people that may not be really guilty. Douglas was ashamed of what he did and when he came back to the town, the first thing he did was to go to the church for praying and apologizing for killing people who never did what he thought they did.

Right up front I have to say I liked Gregory Peck's character, and the story in general had the makings of a good revenge Western. However I can't get past some rather large plot holes in the story that leave me puzzled even now as I write this. Jim Douglass (Peck), on his arrival in Rio Arriba, states to the sheriff (Herbert Rudley) that he's traveled a hundred miles from Winthrop to witness the hanging of the four outlaws. Now if it was better explained how he covered all that ground I wouldn't be so perplexed. However Douglass's ranch was only four miles away! The Padre (Andrew Duggan) knew that, and even told Josefa Velarde (Joan Collins) how to get there through the San Marcos Pass.

Which brings up my next point - how would the sheriff of San Arriba be unaware of such a large ranch so close to his town? Or have never heard of the owner? Is it possible the sheriff never had to leave town during the execution of his duties? It didn't make sense to me.

So as one point leads to another, the inconsistencies continue to pile up. Rio Arriba didn't strike me as a very big place, and the outside view of the local church offered a structure in keeping with the town's size. However once you got inside, it was as big and as ornate as a cathedral! On top of that, the church was packed for services in the middle of the week, and in a screen freeze of the choir I counted twenty eight boys singing! Where would they all have come from? I don't know, all of this stuff kept intruding on my paying attention to the story.

Had all this stuff been dealt with a bit more carefully, I think the irony of Jim Douglass's mistake would have been a lot more thought provoking. As it is, I've never seen Lee Van Cleef grovel in a Western before, and to say that the gunning of Bill Zachary (Stephen Boyd) was one of the strangest looking showdowns I've ever seen in a Western is an understatement. The icing on the cake here was when the Indian Lujan (Henry Silva) managed to convince Douglass that he and his outlaw friends had nothing to do with the murder of his wife. When it finally dawned on Peck's character that the Butler did it, well that about did it for me too.

So I guess this is one of those rare occasions where I liked the story while watching it, but upon reflection of what transpired I've managed to talk my way out of it. Well maybe not all the way. Like I mentioned earlier, I liked the way Gregory Peck carried himself in the story, and Joan Collins' character didn't irritate the way I thought she would. Now if I can only figure out what the title had to do with the picture.