![]() ![]() This was one of Borgnine's last bit roles before the big-time. Seeing Ernest Borgnine just a year before his Marty Oscar win is very gratifying. Here she's given the name 'papayas' for obvious reasons, and a peasant blouse to wear that helps explain the gag further. She's not much in her short-lived American career but is terrific in her Mexican and Spanish movies as a singer and comedienne, well worth haunting Spanish-language movie channels to find. Sarita Montiel is 'introduced' to American audiences, an advent that didn't take, as Sam Fuller introduced her again two years later in his Run of the Arrow. ![]() Maybe she was, if her medium shot was filmed after the fact. But the last shot shows Ben Trane walking totally alone as if Sarita were reacting in a different dimension. The ending is particularly strange in that both the rising music and parallel cutting between Coop and Sarita Montiel indicate that they're heading for a fade-out clinch. His third-act redemption is sketchy to the point of being an afterthought, or perhaps a concession to the star's demands. Ben Trane is written as Jo Erin's treacherous equal. Gary Cooper is slightly less effective, perhaps because the actor insists on playing the solid good guy, totally at odds with the character in the script. At one point Lancaster even says that he "Always wanted to be a sailor." But he's still a sick, charming rattlesnake. There's a hint of parody in the way he grins at the camera like The Crimson Pirate. Lancaster is fall-down funny and a little disturbing at the same time. One wonders how Aldrich got away with this kind of savagery, as well as the half-heard dialogue bit where Lancaster clearly says, "Well, I'll be a son of a bitch!" One slaying, showing only Lancaster's self-satisfied face as he rams a lance through the neck of unlucky 'little tin soldier' Henry Brandon, is so gruesome by implication, it almost hurts to watch. His baiting of the luckless Charlie (Jack Lambert), only to gun him down with a sneaky, showoff circus trick shot ("Anyone else string with Charlie?") is slimier and funnier than any of Clint Eastwood's casual killings. Ben Trane and Jo Erin upstage one another with more stylish double-crosses than the battling birds of Tex Avery's What's Buzzin' Buzzard?, and Lancaster's psychotic joy for killing equals the amorality of the mayhem in the later Sergio Leone westerns. ![]() The revolutionaries have positioned a sexy spy in the caravan, Nina (Sarita Montiel), whose exact mission is unclear.īesides being a remarkably '80s- style 'buddy' picture, Vera Cruz is astonishingly precocious in its cynicism. Things get dicey when a triple-cross of unfaithful allies develops between the adventurers, their French employers and the Juarista rebels. Impressing the French with a demonstration of Yankee firepower (literally in the Halls of Montezuma), they hire on to escort the Countess Marie Duvarre (Denise Darcel) to the Caribbean port of Vera Cruz under the leadership of the grinning Marquis de Labordere (Cesar Romero). Also looking for trouble is the charismatic but incredibly untrustworthy Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster), who leads a group of n'er-do-wells hoping to enlist as killers for the corrupt Emperor. At the conclusion of the Civil War, dispossessed and defeated Southerner Ben Trane (Gary Cooper) drifts south along with dozens of freebooting Americans looking for a way to earn, connive or steal big money in the civil war between the French legionnaires of Maximillian (George Macready) and the revolutionary Juaristas. The "western" setting is actually international, as the story covers the ruthless and mercenary exploits of a band of American criminals looking for riches in Mexico. The first movie filmed in the interesting format Superscope Vera Cruz introduces the first modern images of American gunslingers facing down hundreds of armed Mexicans, exporting their sharpshooting mayhem for sale to the highest bidder. Vera Cruz boasts great performances from big stars, a gallery of up 'n coming tough guy talent and frenzied direction from a big talent making his first big-budget production. Robert Aldrich may have inspired the entire Italian western movement of the 1960s with this rip-roaring, cynical and slightly sadistic adventure with a subversive political dimension. Produced by Harold Hecht, James Hill Burt Lancaster Henry Brandon, Archie Savage, Jack Lambert Starring Burt Lancaster, Gary Cooper, Sarita Montiel, George Macready,ĭenise Darcel, Morris Ankrum, Charles Buchinsky (Bronson), Ernest Borgnine. 1954 / Color / 2:1 widescreen (Superscope) / 94 min.
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