![]() Unfortunately, though colored by Technicolor the film format it was filmed in, Superscope, was not known for clarity. ![]() The film was entirely shot in Mexico, so happily it has a different look than other Westerns of the era. The violence (though not the gore) would hold its own with many spaghetti westerns from 15 years later. Cesar Romero plays the Marquis with a patrician charm.ĭirector Robert Aldrich, perhaps best known for The Dirty Dozen or Kiss Me Deadly, was a tough guy movie director, and this is a pretty tough film. Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, and even Charles Bronson show up as members of Joe’s vile little sharp-shooting crew. The supporting cast is practically a who’s who of ’50s character actors. Burt Lancaster has always had a terrific physical presence on the screen, and here his sense of charm and terror coalesce into a sometimes loathsome, sometimes lovable character. ![]() The creepier one is between Joe and the countess, who both know the other is trying to string them along. The more wholesome is between Ben and a Mexican girl, Nina, who steals his wallet after he rescues her from Joe rapacious crew. There’s a pair of semi-romantic situations in the film. The film has a number of fun action sequences, including an ambush of the caravan in the town, and a pretty terrific final siege sequence when all the various players in this western heist meet up in the port town. The duet between Joe and Ben becomes a trio… except that the Marquis, loyal to the emperor and the countess’s ostensible lover, knows about the betrayal.Īnd there are betrayals within betrayals on the long road to Vera Cruz. The three strike up a deal… split three ways, $3 million still goes a long way. Of course, they know their team of roughnecks is overkill for this mission, and soon discover the countess’s wagon is filled with hidden gold, $3 million to raise an army of French mercenaries.īut the countess knows about it, and wants it for herself. Joe, Ben, and the men are hired to escort a countess from the Mexican Emperor’s palace to Vera Cruz, where she will take a ship back to France. Ben exudes decency, so he doesn’t often have to exhibit it. The very decent Ben Trane pretty quickly gets in with Joe’s group of misfits criminals, doesn’t blink an eye when they threaten a group of children to get away from Mexican revolutionaries, and grimaces but doesn’t complain when Joe murders a pair of inconvenient men in cold blood. The tricked is Ben Trane, a Southern gentleman just out of the civil war played with typical stoic decency by Gary Cooper. The trickster is Joe Erin, played by Burt Lancaster as a sociopath with a smile so white, he’s got to be trying to blind you. Our protagonists meet when one tricks the other into stealing a horse. And everyone seems to know about it all the time, and roll with it. It’s a story about heroes who are mercenaries who are on the wrong side of a revolution for most of the film, and are always planning to betray their employers, and each other. Vera Cruz (1954) is an interesting western: it’s a buddy movie where the buddies never really like each other.
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