_**Robert Mitchum caught between Mexico and America**_ A man from Missouri now living in Mexico and working for shady officials breaks his leg while conducting business in a West Texas town across the river. He has time to consider his future options, which include maybe joining the Texas Rangers and possibly hooking up with the unsatisfied wife of a straitlaced officer (Julie London & Gary Merrill). Meanwhile his bosses in Mexico blame him for a lost shipment of firearms. “The Wonderful Country” (1959) is similar in tone (not plot) to “Vera Cruz” (1954) and “One-Eyed Jacks” (1961), but lacks their compelling stories to make it great. This is still a worthwhile Western. It’s realistic and weighty with a few meaty dialogues and gems to mine, not to mention it’s nice to see a black character in an old Western (Leroy 'Satchel' Paige). It just needed a more focused script to tie everything together for a more absorbing experience. The film runs 1 hour, 37 minutes, and was shot entirely in Mexico (Chihuahua, Sonora and Durango). GRADE: B-
This is really just a film for Robert Mitchum fans. He is "Brady", a hard-nosed drifter who manages to get embroiled in some gun-running on the US/Mexican border, then to break his leg, then to have to fight off the designs of Julie London's "Helen" (who happens to be married to a Yankee captain - Gary Merrill). The film is certainly not dull - aside from some gently smouldering scenes from Miss London, poor old "Brady" is constantly jumping ships with aplomb - trying to stay just one step ahead each time. The dialogue is sometimes quite pithy, and there are plenty of action scenes. Mitchum brings some charisma to the screen, but London should have stuck to singing, her acting never had very much depth to it. The rest of the film is just a little bit too busy - too many characters, too many complications and by the end I wasn't sure if I was really so very bothered.
William Munny is a retired, once-ruthless killer turned gentle widower and hog farmer. To help support his two motherless children, he accepts one last bounty-hunter mission to find the men who brutalized a prostitute. Joined by his former partner and a cocky greenhorn, he takes on a corrupt sheriff.
Despite trying to keep his swashbuckling to a minimum, a threat to California's pending statehood causes the adventure-loving Don Alejandro de la Vega and his wife, Elena, to take action.
Around the film hang fascinating questions about border politics, which I’ll touch on in an introduction before the screening. One of Eugene Buck’s motivations for making the film may have been his rough cross-examination during his kidnappers’ first trials, in October 1913, when defense attorneys cast him as a confused and unreliable witness against idealistic freedom fighters. On film he could reproduce the pursuit, the shootouts, his kidnapping, and his friend’s murder just as he had testified. Reenacting the crime on film may have been the best revenge—and a way to honor the sacrifice of Deputy Ortiz, a twenty-year police veteran and, for the era, a rare Mexican American lawman.
A small-town sheriff in the American West enlists the help of a disabled man, a drunk, and a young gunfighter in his efforts to hold in jail the brother of the local bad guy.
At the beginning of the 1913 Mexican Revolution, greedy bandit Juan Miranda and idealist John H. Mallory, an Irish Republican Army explosives expert on the lam from the British, fall in with a band of revolutionaries plotting to strike a national bank. When it turns out that the government has been using the bank as a hiding place for illegally detained political prisoners - who are freed by the blast - Miranda becomes a revolutionary hero against his will.
An aging group of outlaws look for one last big score as the "traditional" American West is disappearing around them.
With thousands of cattle being rustled from White Sage ranch the 1930's Texas Rangers are called in. They manage to get one of their agents into the gang by making them think he is the Pecos Kid on the lam.
Singing cowboy Whip Wilson, the foreman on a cattle drive, quits his job to pursue five bank robbers who murdered his brother.
When brash Texas border officer Mike Norton wrongfully kills and buries the friend and ranch hand of Pete Perkins, the latter is reminded of a promise he made to bury his friend, Melquiades Estrada, in his Mexican home town. He kidnaps Norton and exhumes Estrada's corpse, and the odd caravan sets out on horseback for Mexico.
A trio of unemployed silent film actors are mistaken for real heroes by a small Mexican village in search of someone to stop a malevolent bandit.
The story of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who led a rebellion against the corrupt, oppressive dictatorship of president Porfirio Díaz in the early 20th century.