Sun 16 Aug 2020
A Western Movie Review by David Vineyard: THE BRAVADOS (1958).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western movies[7] Comments
THE BRAVADOS. 20th Century Fox, 1958. Gregory Peck, Joan Collins, Stephen Boyd, Albert Salmi, Henry Silva, Lee Van Cleef, Herbert Rudley, Andrew Duggan, Ken Scott, George Voskovec, Barry Coe, Gene Evans. Screenplay by Philip Yordan, based on a novel by Frank O’Rourke. Director Henry King.
— Henry Silva as the half-breed, to outlaws Stephen Boyd, Albert Salmi, and Lee Van Cleef.
This widescreen Technicolor western may not quite be a classic, but it comes close, and as the saying goes, I wouldn’t want to live on the difference. Directed by veteran Henry King and with a remarkable cast of actors, even for a Western from this period, it follows one man’s path to revenge and ultimately redemption.
Jim Douglass (Gregory Peck) rides into a quiet and tense little town on the eve of a public hanging of four outlaws who shot up the place and killed several people. All he will say is that he is from a small town one hundred miles away and he is there to see the hanging. The law (Herbert Rudley) is nervous about strangers in town and waiting for the hangman, unsure of this quiet sullen man who has traveled so far to see four men die.
Also in town is Josefa Valarde (Joan Collins, and quite good here) who knew Douglass five years ago in New Orleans. Through her we gradually piece together Peck’s nature and journey, his wife’s death, his six month quest to hunt down these four men he has never seen (that’s a key point later in the film).
There are several small characters from the town drawn sharply, the young lovers and the girl’s disapproving father who wants more than small town life for her (Kathleen Gallant, Barry Coe, George Voskovec), a gullible good natured deputy (Ken Scott), Rudley’s lawman, padre Andrew Duggan (who knows the secret Douglass hides from everyone).
During a church service the supposed hangman (Joe deRita — yes, that Joe deRita, unbilled and quite good in serious role) frees the prisoner, stabbing Rudley and getting killed for his efforts and the young girl Emma (Gallant), is taken hostage by the escaping killers.
There’s a fine scene when the wounded Rudley stumbles bleeding into the church, eloquently shot and staged for full effect.
In a scene that echoes The Searchers, Peck refuses to join the others in a pointless nighttime posse. He knows the hunt will be long and deadly.
Peck’s performance here as a man grown deadly and possessed by his anger, grief, and need for revenge anchors the film.
Boyd is his usual charming over-sexed sadist, a part he perfected (his showdown with Peck is well staged as less a duel than an execution), Salmi a vicious brute (a part he perfected), Van Cleef a hothead prone to losing his cool and a coward when it comes down to it (one of the stronger scenes key to the movie is when Peck’s character executes him in cold blood), and Silva the cool half-breed (Salmi: “I don’t trust the Indian. You never know what he’s thinking.â€}, the key to this Western drama that proves to be much more than just the typical Western revenge Kabuki theater we are so used to.
Uniquely for King, who usually composed his films like paintings, the camera work here is often nervous and edgy, especially when Peck is on screen. Shot by the great Leon Shamroy, who often worked with King, the film’s intelligence goes well beyond the screenplay and O’Rourke’s fine novel (he also wrote Two Mules for The Marquesa, the basis for The Professionals), to the films visual style which varies from wide sweeping shots to tense close ups.
A tensely shot fight between Salmi and Peck in a shadowy grove of woods is one of the best uses of outdoor Technicolor filming you will see in a film and the dramatic scene when the posse finds Salmi hanging upside down from a tree a masterpiece of implied violence. You’ll notice Peck wears a black hat and dark blue and black clothes throughout the film and rides a black horse, visual shorthand for what he has become.
What isn’t shown or even said is more eloquent than any dialogue could be in this film.
The key to the film lies in the duel of wits between Henry Silva’s half-breed and Gregory Peck. As the killers circle towards the Douglass ranch never knowing it, a gentle neighbor of Douglass is killed (Gene Evans), and the girl attacked by Boyd, but left alive at Silva’s insistence when he interrupts her rape by Boyd to force him to flee. Even Collins, who has sought to curb Peck’s wrath is ready to see him kill them all when they find the girl in Evans cabin.
Peck gives a subtle understated performance here. As the hunt goes on his humanity begins to reemerge, as he kills the men one by one until only he and Silva are left.
Silva: I had no reason to kill you. Why do you hunt me?
The answer changes this film from what it began as, and gives it a remarkable turn rare in a Western revenge film, one Peck plays to the hilt, and one that leaves this film feeling remarkably modern and marks its rare intelligence. That is is also beautiful to look at and the cinematography is part and parcel of telling the story is also notable. There is also a fine score by Lionel Newman with contributions by Hugo Friedhofer and Alfred Newman uncredited.
The suspense here is less whether Peck’s character will survive and more whether he will end up worse than the men he is hunting.
Peck has a particularly good Western resume, from films like The Gunfighter, and Yellow Sky, to Only the Valiant and The Big Country and fairly late in his career, The Stalking Moon. This one fits well within the mold,
And if you want to call it a classic, you won’t get an argument from me.
August 16th, 2020 at 9:49 pm
It seems that avenging the rape/murder of one’s wife, sweetheart, sister, or daughter began to emerge as a dominant motivation in Westerns beginning in the late ’50s, with THE BRAVADOS, LAST TRAIN TO GUN HILL, RANCHO NOTORIOUS and even THE SEARCHERS. It carried over into Spaghetti Westerns with FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE and DEATH RIDES A HORSE. I don’t recall earlier Westerns where that was the case, although in some the hero was out to get the varmint who seduced and ruined his sister, as in RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE and 3 BAD MEN. I suppose the trend reflected the greater openness toward sex and violence in films, generally, as the ’60s approached.
August 16th, 2020 at 10:41 pm
I thought avenging the rape or murder of a loved one is, or was, socially acceptable for any leading man; and I think that was a correct evaluation at the time. The industry was allowed to do a little more than they had been, and show some angst — which I just hate. Kill the bastard or not, but please no deep moods.
August 17th, 2020 at 5:58 pm
The remarkable thing with this film is that it avoids the deep moods and angst, certainly Peck’s character shows his pain and anger, but there are only a handful of shots of him alone and in those the camera is as restless as he is, as one review on IMDB pointed out at times barely able to constrain him in the frame, which works far better than any lingering shots of stillness and “acting”.
The film moves continually hardly lingering at any point. Even the small town is shown from a different perspective in almost every scene, and some shots such as at the end when Peck enters the church and is dwarfed by it, Andrew Duggan’s padre high above him on an impossible tall ladder cleaning almost godlike, say more than any dialogue or monologue or tiresome shot of Peck suffering. A single look up when he kneels to pray says volumes.
For a method actor Peck can be very natural on screen at times.
It is a very physical movie, much more defined by movement than dialogue, and much of the violence seems much worse for not being shown, making the moments when we do see it all the more powerful. We know what Peck is dealing with, what he is becoming, but it is restrained to an almost Gary Cooper level, a frown, narrowed eyes, a stern mouth, matter of fact almost flat aspect speech.
This could be overwhelmed by angst and “acting”, but no one gets the chance.
Even at the end when he is confronted by a devastating revelation his reaction is less brooding than physical, literally not being able to know what to do with his hands as he tries to confront what he has become, and again it is a short shot and done from a certain distance, not a tight claustraphobic tight shot.
My only criticism might be that Andrew Duggan’s padre offers him a too easy out, but the script is smart enough not to let Peck take it even if we are eager to on his behalf. He is accepted back into society, and a happy ending is implied, but it is clear Peck knows it will never be enough to erase what he has done.
Like John Wayne in THE SEARCHERS he walks away, perhaps not alone, but still isolated by what he has become and his judgment on himself even though the world sees him as a hero.
And I really short changed Henry Silva here who gives one of his best screen performances as a simple man who is caught to some extent between two worlds. He is neither a murderer nor a rapist, but not above taking silver off a dead man to help his family. It’s a fairly complex portrayal for a Western with both he and Peck almost noirish protagonists in a big epic style Technicolor Widescreen Western setting.
The threat of rape was always there in the Simon Legree stereotype of the Western villain as either brute or slick manipulator. It may not have been said in earlier Westerns, but the passion the villain has for the schoolmarm or the rancher’s daughter is suggestive of potential rape in the most innocent of films. He may want to marry her for her land or purity, but it is clear he is not going to “respect” her.
By the fifties after the horrors of WW II rape no longer seemed quite so removed from society and as the censors weakened film naturally went there and often to more extreme violence. After all, a significant number of the audience had just fought in a war, seen friends killed, seen horror they would never forget. Hopalong Cassidy saving the day and the schoolmarm tied to the railroad track wasn’t going to cut it with adult audiences.
August 18th, 2020 at 9:53 am
The only hole in the script is who hired Curly Joe to break them out of jail.
August 18th, 2020 at 10:24 am
Are you kidding? Peck is always filled with angst and self-righteous progressive guilt. In everything.
August 18th, 2020 at 11:00 am
Okay,not The World in His Arms or Night People, both personal favorites, but neither definitive Peck. Have you seen The Paradine Case? Admittedly some of the writing is heavy handed, but it is embraced, rather than thrown away, by the star. Definitive Peck, Twelve O’Clock High, in which he, and or his character, actually has a nervous breakdown, in some attempt to humanize command. Not for me. Those nervous nellies need to be turfed from the service. In modern times this has been embraced by Spielberg, especially in Mucous…(Munich).
August 25th, 2020 at 10:42 am
to ray o’leary:
In 1957-58, when this picture was made, Joe DeRita wasn’t Curly Joe yet.
If I’ve read the timeline right, it was after he’d finished his work on The Bravados that he was formally engaged to join the Three Stooges.
As long as I’m here, I’d like to share with you the radio spot for The Bravados, which was a major earworm of my boyhood:
(Driving Western-Latin rhythm)
THE BRAVADOS! THE BRAVADOS!
For what they did to the woman he loved –
– He broke them one by one!
Who’s the man? Who’s the man?
GREGORY PECK! GREGORY PECK!
What’s the name? What’s the name?
THE BRAVADOS!! (Gregory Peck!)
THE BRAVADOS!! (Gregory Peck!)
THE BRAVADOS!! (Gregory Peck!)
You should really hear it with the music.
(And if you’d heard it that way, twenty times a day at age 8, you’d remember it after all these years too …)