Tequila Sunrise

Tequila Sunrise (1988) begins with two drug dealers nervously waiting for a meeting with their buyers. Dale ‘Mac’ McKussic (Mel Gibson) appears to be the more experienced of the two as he secretly hides the pound of cocaine in the back of their hotel room’s toilet because he had noticed too many peanut shells on the ground outside their room (a sure sign of cops on the stake-out). Soon the buyers arrive and Mac makes a quick exit, but not before ‘taking a leak’ first to collect the drug stash, and then meets one of the buyers in the hall. Identities are uncovered as the two beginning chatting and the ‘buyer’ in the hallway is revealed as Dt. Lt. Nick Frescia (Kurt Russel) who quizzes Mac on why he is back on the drug scene and out of retirement. Mac replies that he’s simply teaching his lawyer, who has come upon some cocaine, how to sell the drugs, and that the police won’t find any evidence in the room because Mac couldn’t let a kid like Andy get busted. It is apparent that Mac and Nick share a unique bond between drug dealer and police officer as Nick warns Mac not to return to his car. As promised, a full-on raid descends on the building and Mac barely escapes to his favorite Italian restaurant, Vallenari’s.

Nick later sits down next to Mac at his table and tells him that they know he’s up to something and that the cops in the van outside, DEA Agent Hal Maguire (J.T. Walsh) in particular, think that he’s dealing through code from within the restaurant. Suddenly the restaurant’s host, Jo Ann Vallenari (Michelle Pfeiffer) appears at the table and Nick is immediately love-struck. When Hal brings Jo Ann in for questioning the next day and attempts to blackmail her for information on Mac, Nick comes to her rescue and is consequently owed a dinner at the restaurant from the willing Jo Ann. As the two are dining, their platonic relationship becomes something more, even though Jo Ann knows that Nick is scouting for information on Mac. Although Nick is the new Head of Narcotics for Los Angeles County, he can’t imagine arresting his friend; that is, until Hal reveals that his sources say there will be a massive cocaine deal going down soon between Mac and the mysterious Mexican dealer, Carlos (Raul Julia). This situation begs for Nick to put his friendship on hold and discover all he can about the deal, if only to help his friend get an easy sentence.

Mac notices the heat on him and so stalls the deal between him and Carlos. The two drug dealers have been friends ever since Mac went to a Mexican jail for two years for smoking marijuana on a beach in Mexico and Carlos happened to save his life while on the inside. Mac decides to focus instead on his son’s birthday for which he asks Jo Ann and her restaurant to cater. At the party, Jo Ann sees her best customer as a doting father, not a drug dealer, and tells Mac afterwards that she has been talking with Nick. When Mac gives Jo Ann a $2500 tip for the party, she believes it to be a bribe to keep quiet and confronts Mac on the beach outside his house only to embarrassingly discover that he had given her the envelope for his ex-wife and not the one to pay for the party. At that moment, Mac’s son Cody takes a nasty spill on his surfboard and Jo Ann is obliged to help Mac care for him. It is here that Mac and Jo Ann have a heart-to-heart and Mac reveals that he doesn’t go to her restaurant to make drug deals, but instead to see her.

That night at the restaurant, Jo Ann is happy to see Nick until he leads her to the wine cellar where the Mexican Federales, and in particular Comandante Xavier Escalante, are hiding with the DEA to plan a raid on Mac when Carlos arrives. The DEA needs the Comandante’s help to ID Carlos as no one knows what he looks like. Jo Ann realizes that Nick is still just using her to get to Mac and goes to Mac’s house to look after Cody while Mac is away. After Cody is picked up by his mother, Mac returns and he and Jo Ann finally release their sexual tension in a passionate hot tub sex scene, much to the delight of the Mexican Federale surveillance team. Mac steps back into the house and is suddenly confronted with the Comandante, who actually turns out to be Carlos. He is a reckless drug dealer and attempts to run the deal that night, but Mac is reluctant due to his relationship with Jo Ann, who is called back to work only to realize that Nick had called her to get her out of Mac’s house before the raid.

Jo Ann returns to the house to find Carlos getting ready to leave for his boat. He brings her along and then proceeds to get intoxicated with Mac so that he can convince him that Jo Ann needs to be eliminated as she is the only one who can identify them. Mac manages to drunkenly get Jo Ann and himself into a smaller motorboat, which carries the cash and cocaine stash, and Jo Ann promptly reveals to Mac that she’s in love with him. Meanwhile, Nick has put two and two together and realized that Carlos is the Comandante. Then he and Hal pick up a radio transmission from the ‘Federales’ giving away Mac’s position. Before Nick can arrive, Mac drops Jo Ann off and then attempts to blow-up Carlos by leaking the motorboat’s gas, but not before Carlos pulls a gun on Mac. The two struggle and finally the gun goes off, running the bullet first through Mac’s side and then into Carlos’ gut. Carlos dies in his friend’s arms just as Hal arrives and begins mercilessly shooting at Mac who jumps into the water. The bullets light the leaking gasoline on fire, and Nick arrives just in time to see his friend becomes lost in a sea of fire and explosion. The next scene shows Jo Ann arriving at the beach upon Nick’s instructions, at some unspecified length of time after that fateful night. Suddenly she sees Mac hiding in the waves just off the shore and races into his arms. As Nick watches from above, it is clear that he is allowing the woman he loves to be happy with his best friend, Mac, instead of him, while keeping them both under his watchful eye of protection and away from the clutches of the law.

The international relations displayed between these two countries are a bit unclear as the Mexican Federales actually turn out to be Carlos and his henchmen, and the DEA officers are made to look ignorant in the wake of trusting the comandante as an ally for 8 years. The one apparent tie to the US for Latin America, in particular Mexico and Colombia, is that they are the drug suppliers for the white, American dealers. Colombia is described only in terms of the Mac’s incessant accounting problems with them, while Mexico is portrayed through Carlos as a corrupt and dishonest culture and, although quick to keep friendships alive, also merciless in their attempts to escape justice; for example, wanting to kill Jo Ann for fear of being identified. The final conclusion drawn shows a landslide victory for the foreigners being the ones who are needed to make the drug deals proceed, but are also the ones who take the fall as the American drug lords are able to continue living their lives in peace, under the protection of their very own police force.

The Ride Back

In Western movies, an American gunslinger who rides down to Mexico does so for three reasons: 1) He is a mercenary looking to make some cash 2) He is a lawman retrieving a criminal to be tried in the United States, or 3) He is a troubled soul seeking redemption. The Ride Back (1957) follows the latter two conventions, depicting the journey of Sheriff Chris Hamish who is dead set on retrieving accused murderer Roberto Kallen from his Mexican hideout to stand trail in the United States, and the bond that forms between them while on the journey back up north.

The film comically opens as Hamish tries to get his search warrant for Kallen signed by a Mexican police officer. The border station doubles at the officer’s home, so he is preoccupied by his wailing child and nagging wife, but after Hamish communicates his mission via charades and simplified English, the officer is happy to assist him. When Hamish arrives in Cerralvo, the Mexican town where Kallen is hiding out, he finds the accused criminal deeply rooted there; he has a fiercely loyal girlfriend named Elena and the local men rush to his aid upon hearing that Hamish plans to take him. This acceptance is partly explained by Kallen’s half-Mexican parentage, but more so by his charisma. Hamish is the opposite in this respect; he has no noteworthy characteristics, is unskilled with a gun and is visibly scared. Kallen even asks him: “Why did they send you after me? Man, you don’t look to me like you’re much.” To which Hamish replies: “I’m not.”

Hamish succeeds on getting Kallen on the road, but only because Kallen treats Hamish as a mere nuisance and expects to be back in Cerralvo by sundown. However, Hamish thwarts Kallen’s multiple attempts to escape and succeeds in bringing him to the border, with a love-sick Elena following all the way. The border officer, loyal to Hamish as a fellow lawman, refuses to hear Kallen’s appeals and detains Elena. However, once in the U.S. the duo encounter the Apaches, a Native American tribe portrayed as roving warriors who mercilessly kill and get smashed on looted alcohol. They hide in a small frontier dwelling whose occupants, except for one little girl, have been murdered by the Apaches. Tensions between the men reach a boiling point as Kallen lets loose his searing contempt for Hamish’s cowardice, and Hamish repeats that he’s taking Kallen back to stand trial. When the mood has cooled, Kallen appeals to Hamish, stating that he killed in self-defense and only ran from the crime because he knew that as an outsider he was as good as hung. Hamish promises Kallen a fair trial, but also admits that this mission is not about the law but about him; Hamish has been always been failure, hated by everyone including his wife, and this is his one chance to set things right.

Kallen gains the timid trust of the girl and the three barely escape from the house under fire by the Apaches. The Apaches catch up to them a mere two miles from Scotssville, where Kallen is to stand trail, and severely wound Hamish. After Kallen has killed their aggressors he is confronted with a staggering moral dilemma: to return to life in Mexico or face the American justice system. At first he charges the girl with retrieving help for Hamish, who is delirious with pain, and rides off south. Before long, however, he returns to find that the blank-eyed girl and the semi-unconscious Hamish have not moved, so he loads them onto his horse and nobly heads to Scotssville, where he can only hope that Hamish can keep his promise of a fair trial.

There are two kinds of American outlaws that escape to Mexico in Western movies, those who are essentially bad and are evading the law, and those who are essentially good and are taking refuge from a broken legal system. In The Ride Back, Kallen is of the latter category; throughout the film he is shown to be increasingly tender-hearted and well-intentioned, but would have been hung in the United States by a prejudiced jury. However, the film sends the message that while juries are fallible, the law must nevertheless be abided by.

The Ride Back shows a great degree of partnership and integration between Mexico and the United States, as evidenced by the Mexican police officer’s eagerness to help Hamish exercise the law across the border. However, Mexican law is portrayed as something very different to American law. The Mexican, even though he is the go-to person for signing search warrants, ambles up to Hamish in a sweaty t-shirt, has to deal with a crying baby left carelessly on the sand, and fails to immediately recognize the paper that Hamish holds before him. Though he is ultimately friendly and helpful, the police officer, and the national bureaucracy that he represents, is not efficient, knowledgeable or professional. There is a great degree of Spanish dialogue in the film for which no subtitles are given; for a non-Spanish speaking audience this adds greater confusion to the Mexican police officer hollering to his family members and greater exoticism to the loving words of Elena to Kallen. This distance created by language is at odds with the apparent closeness of Mexico and the United States; throughout the film Hamish repeatedly asks Mexicans if they speak English and vice versa for Spanish. At the end of the day, the two neighbouring cultures are portrayed as worlds apart.

For a Few Dollars More

For a Few Dollars More (1965) is the second installment of the “Dollars Trilogy” starring Clint Eastwood and directed by Sergio Leone. The film continues the A Fistful of Dollars (1964) narrative of frontier lawlessness as Eastwood partners with another bounty hunter to pursue El Indio, a notorious killer and bank robber, in southern Texas.

El Indio makes his first appearance while being busted out of jail by a motley gang of Mexican outlaws. He hunts down the man who jailed him, and in a theatrical display of rabid vengeance in gratuitous cruelty, El Indio has his wife and infant child dragged away to be shot, and then shoots the trembling man after they listen to the tinkling melody of a gold pocket-watch. However, El Indio is not so cold-blooded that this event leaves him unaffected; after the murder he motions desperately to his henchman to light him a joint. He spends the rest of the film alternating between being a hot-blooded, cackling gunslinger and a stoned, disheveled wreck. He congregates with his men in El Paso, site of a purportedly impenetrable bank that holds half a million dollars. Coincidentally, he and the carpenter who installed the safe were jailed together, so he knows the schematics of inside the bank.

Meanwhile, the skilled bounty hunters Manco (played by Eastwood) and Colonel Douglas Mortimer have shown up in El Paso hoping to earn the reward for bringing in El Indio, dead or alive. They make a partnership and a plan whereby Manco infiltrates El Indio’s gang. El Indio knows that Manco plans to double-cross him, but involves him in the bank heist anyway. However, the trick is on Manco, because instead of catching El Indio mid-heist, his gang merely blows up the bank wall, lets the safe topple into a wagon, and speeds off with it. Manco terminates his partnership with Mortimer and tries to deceive him. Mortimer is too intelligent for this, and the pair meets again at Agua Caliente, a small town of whitewashed adobe, where El Indio is hiding out. Manco is already accepted by the gang, and Mortimer joins up as a locksmith. However, when they are caught trying to steal the money they are severely punished, beaten up to a chorus of maniacally laughing Mexican thugs.

The reprehensible El Indio proceeds to double-cross members of his own gang; he releases Manco and Mortimer then, knowing that the duo are better with guns, sends his men after them so that they will be killed, leaving him and his henchman all of the money. El Indio is now visibly unhinged, which tips the smartest gang member off to the deception, so he stays behind to hold El Indio at gunpoint. He asks why he is obsessed with the gold pocket-watch. Flash-backs have occurred before as El Indio sinks into a pot-induced stupor, but now the memory is shown in full: El Indio creeps into a bedroom where two young lovers are seated; he shoots the man and rapes the woman, who shoots herself while underneath him. This girl’s portrait is inside of the pocket-watch and she turns out to be Mortimer’s sister. The final scene is a shoot-out between Mortimer and El Indio, in which the former is victorious. Mortimer is not interested in collecting the bounty on El Indio and his gang, motivated solely by retribution, and instead lets a contented Manco ride away with a cart full of corpses which are worth a (then) massive sum of $27,000.

For a Few Dollars More has a theatrical trailer containing the phrase: “In a land where life had no value, death might have a price.” This land is geographically in the United States, but not portrayed as the United States proper. Just as in A Fistful of Dollars, this liminal zone between the United States and Mexico has weak rule of law, is a repository for dubious characters, and has a hybrid appearance of both nations. Manco, the archetypal mercenary without a past, operates according to his own moral code because the official one has broken down. In the opening scene, Manco asks a sheriff, “Tell me, is the sheriff supposed to be courageous, loyal and above all honest?” before contemptuously ripping off his badge. However, Manco does not attempt to reinstate his own moral code; instead he blows up a jail to release a friend of El Indio, double-crosses his partner, and is solely profit-driven. The Mexico-U.S. border itself is a cause for anxiety as a place that cannot be effectively policed, but perhaps more so is the lawless individual.

The difference between Manco and El Indio illustrates the difference between law and morality; while both the hero and villain are lawless, only the villain is unarguably amoral. The character of El Indio was crafted to provoke numerous anxieties; on top of being cruel, murderous, double-crosssing and thieving, he also is a drug-addict and rapist. For a Few Dollars More was produced in the 1960s when anti-drug propaganda was in full swing, and there could be few better images to dissuade marijuana use than a glassy-eyed El Indio trying to smoke away painful memories of murder. The name “El Indio” gives a Mexican twist to the cowboys and Indians genre, but just like in the old Westerns when the supposedly rapacious sexuality of Indian men would cause them to carry off white women, so El Indio rapes Mortimer’s sister for no given reason. Old stories die hard.

Bells of San Angelo

On one level, Bells of San Angelo (1947) tells a straightforward story about B-movie cowboy Roy Rogers uncovering a silver smuggling racket on the Mexico-U.S. border. On another level, however, the movie has a humorous, self-referential motif that draws attention to the clichés of the Western genre, causing the viewer to wonder where the reality of the movie stops and self-conscious parody begins.

The film opens with a high-speed chase on horseback that ends with a man being shot, and one of his pursuers planting a hunk of silver ore in his pocket. When the male lead Roy Rogers and sidekick Cookie arrive on the scene, they learn that the men were carrying out orders from their boss to shoot trespassers and thieves found on his Monarch mine, which is on the U.S. side of a large property straddling the Mexico-U.S. border. However, the small size of the silver ore makes Rogers suspicious; its value is not worth killing a man, but perhaps this man had to be silenced. Later, the town receives word that celebrity author Lee Madison is coming to research his latest Western novel; Rogers groans because he thinks that this writer grossly misconstrues the West and gives cowboys a bad name.

Lee Madison turns out to be a woman, and upon hearing the men badmouth her novels she introduces herself under another name, so that she can anonymously observe and take notes on the Western milieu. While she is riding in the welcome carriage for Madison, Rogers stages a hold-up disguised as a bandit. When he sees the woman, he graciously explains that his goal was to rob Madison and redistribute his wealth, thereby enacting the cowboy stereotype he so hates in her novels. When night falls, henchmen for the boss Rex Gridley execute a Mexican border sentry down in the San Angelo mine, which is on the Mexican side of the property. Their conversation reveals the details of the racket: Gridley is smuggling silver, which is cheaper in Mexico, into the Monarch mine through the connected San Angelo mine, and making a profit by selling it as if it were mined on American soil.

In between brawling with the Gridley gang, Roger has a rock sample from the Monarch mine analyzed. This confirms his suspicions that Gridley is running an illegitimate business; the Monarch mine is worthless, its rock merely has silver traces whereas the ore found on the shot man was almost pure, implying that it has been smuggled in. Tensions are heightened when a British official named Lionel Bates comes to renegotiate the property where the mines are located. Madison and Rogers, who discover each other’s true identities, maintain a playful banter between them and sing songs poking fun at Westerns. Eventually, Rogers and his men mobilize against Gridley and his men, entailing a lengthy and theatrical pursuit and shoot-out. The film is generous to its protagonists in the end: Rogers is victorious over the Gridley gang, Cookie makes it rich from the property renegotiations, and Madison has first-hand material for the best Western novel she will ever write.

Bells of San Angelo is a Western in which the characters express their love for and their opinions about the genre, and even consciously let its conventions guide their actions. Madison, familiar with common Western scenarios in novels, enthusiastically helps Rogers and Cookie to bring the scam to light and hunt down its mastermind. At one point during the final shoot-out, Madison and Rogers out-wit Gridley with the same tactic she used in her novel “Murder on the Border.” The characters and settings are all archetypes, from the tough yet suave singing cowboy, to the dim-witted and lovable side-kick, to the mean-spirited and greed-driven nemesis. Like cartoon characters come to life and playing with the pen that drew them, the characters of Bells of San Angelo contemplate, parody and manipulate the Western.

In Bells of San Angelo Mexico assumes its typical Western movie role; a land of opportunity for American adventurers, criminals or fortune-seekers, the kind of people that the morally upstanding characters have to go to Mexico to keep in check. In this case, Gridley has one foot in Mexico to profit on its silver resources up north. What the law is and who enforces it is often ambiguous in Western border-crossing stories. Cookie and Rogers represent two sides of the law; Cookie is the overweight sheriff always twisting his hands in worry about getting search permits and Rogers is the independent lawman with rough-and-ready, immediate solutions. Though Rogers says to Gridley “You have no right to take the law into your own hands” when he orders trespassers and thieves to be shot, Rogers has no qualms about busting jaws and breaking property in the name of justice, that is just what heroes do.

100 Rifles

Along with the typical Western elements of train hijacks and shoot-outs, 100 Rifles (1969) features almost all of the central characters provocatively wet and/or half-naked. However, when the protagonists are not dropping their clothes, they are delivering a story about personal responsibility, set against a very specific politico-economic backdrop.

The opening scene establishes that the Mexican military ruthlessly executes the Yaqui, the indigenous people of Sonora, upon the slightest provocation. Right in front of freedom-fighter Sarita (played by Raquel Welch), they hang her father for attempting to steal a rifle. In town, the brutality continues when nine Yaqui are presented before General Verdugo and gringo businessman Steven Grimes. As Grimes winces, Verdugo has them lined up so that he can slay three with a single bullet, minimizing his costs. One of our heroes, Yaqui Joe (played by Burt Reynolds), makes a ruckus so they can escape. His ad hoc plan fails and he is dragged before the sneering General, but an African-American police officer named Lyedecker (played by Jim Brown) halts the General from killing Joe, for he intends to bring Joe to justice in the United States for a bank robbery of $6000.

Lyedecker assumes that he can reason with the General, but finds out that his credentials are moot in Mexico, and he is just as much a prisoner as Joe. Joe escapes and Lyedecker pursues, and after outrunning the Mexican military they level with each other: Joe feels that in spending the $6000 on rifles to arm the Yaqui, target of an ethnic cleansing plan by Verdugo and his German advisors, he is finally doing something virtuous. Lyedecker aspires to be a full-time police officer, and catching this thief is another feather in his cap. They have little time to convince each other of their respective causes; the military arrives, handcuffs them together and brings them to where the rifles have been uncovered. The General wants to have them killed, alongside the Yaqui who are being executed for petty crimes, but as they face the firing squad Sarita appears and snipes the squad leader. She and other Yaqui pour over the walls, fight with the military, and retreat with the rifles and our heroes.

Joe and Lyedecker are constantly bickering, and Lyedecker resolutely wants no part in the Yaqui struggle; as soon as the military is off their backs he is going to haul Joe back north. The tides turn, however, when the military seize Yaqui children from a pillaged settlement to exchange for rifles, and Lyedecker feels compelled to assist in their rescue. The team successfully overtakes military forces, has a wild party, and leaves the ranch a blazing inferno. Lyedecker and Sarita have sex and his tenderness for her further aligns him with the Yaqui cause. Lyedecker and Joe find out from Grimes, who they took hostage at the ranch, where the stops are for the train to Nogales, where the General awaits. They hatch a plan to stall the train at a water tower, by means of diverting its military passengers with a half-naked Sarita showering beneath it, then hijack it and descend upon Verdugo. The plan works and a shoot-out ensues in Nogales. Lyedecker fires the last shot, killing Verdugo’s horse, which leaves the General to the Yaqui’s vengeance. With Sarita killed in battle, Lyedecker sees that the Yaqui need a leader and entrusts Joe to this task, returning back north empty-handed but a nobler man.

100 Rifles does not employ any conventions to inform the viewer that its context is based on historical fact, such as spoken/textual introduction, provision of dates, or use of real names, which is why elements of the story seem extreme or incongruous. However, there was indeed a epoch in Mexican history, the second reign of Porfirio Diaz (1884-1911), in which the Yaqui were systematically persecuted by the state, and if not killed were forced into labour. Also during this time, Germany adopted a policy of overhauling and equipping the Mexican military, in an effort to curb American influence. In 100 Rifles, this epoch provides a good vehicle for a range of social criticisms. To begin with, Steven Grimes is representative of American business interests in Mexico; he owns a railroad monopoly in Sonora that wrongly traverses Yaqui territory. He is duplicitous, self-interested and spineless; he has no qualms about the Yaqui executions but he does not have the stomach to watch it. His constant fretting about how “Washington” will react to events in Mexico implies that his activities are not legitimate, yet tacitly approved.

Furthermore, the power invested in the state and its representatives is also questioned, most notably when Joe and Lyedecker are moments away from death. Their desperate dialogue starts with incredulity that they are awaiting execution and ends with Joe condemning Lyedecker for wanting to be a part of the police establishment, claiming that the American justice system is just as brutal and arbitrary as the Mexican one. From amoral capitalism to skewed law enforcement, the Mexico of 100 Rifles is a place where ills seen in the United States are played out to greater extremes. These issues, with the added component of race, were particularly important in Civil Rights Movement era 1969 when the film was made. Race is also explored in the movie; it is centered on the racially-motivated slayings of Yaqui by the Mexican government, its leading characters are African-American and Yaqui-American, and it has an interracial sex scene. However, though Lyedecker found that in Mexico justice must be served outside the system, in that a criminal bank robber can become a heroic freedom fighter, he ultimately returns to the United States with faith in the system, determined to stay the course in becoming a cop.

Two Mules for Sister Sara

Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) is a lighthearted Western following the journey of a stern mercenary named Hogan (Clint Eastwood) and a sly woman named Sara (Shirley MacLaine) to aid the Juaristas, revolutionaries struggling against the monarchy imposed by France upon Mexico. As the opening credits roll, the camera pans over the Texas/Chihuahua landscape in which we see all sorts of deadly creatures, but none as bad as the three drunken reprobates about to rape a nun. Luckily, Hogan shows up and shoots them dead, but before he can take leave of this Sister Sara, she finds herself in trouble again: a detachment of the French Cavalry riding towards them sends her into a panic. She is wanted for raising money for the Juaristas.

Together they evade the French, and despite the clash between his gruff attitude and her zealous religiosity, they find that they are fighting for the same side. The difference is that while Sister Sara sympathizes with the Juaristas based on her contempt for French colonialism, Hogan has merely been hired by the Juaristas to stage an attack upon a French garrison; jaded by the American Civil War, he cares nothing for their cause, only that he be paid with half of the seized French treasury. Conveniently, the garrison is stationed next to Sara’s former church, so she provides the details that allow Hogan to come up with a strategy for his attack. They choose the day of an upcoming French national holiday to strike, hoping thereby to catch the enemy off-guard. Meanwhile, despite the sexual tension between the hyper-masculine Hogan and the sweet-faced Sara, because she is a nun, he keeps his desires at bay.

As the pair rides across Chihuahua to the garrison, they witness how the French strike fear in the Mexican people. When Sister Sara infiltrates one of their encampments, for example, she sees the ruthless execution of a young Juarista before his grief-stricken family. Their journey is packed with adventure, such as the day that begins with Hogan getting shot by a Yaqui arrow (the Yaqui are a Native American tribe that originally lived in northern Mexico) and ends with him detonating a bridge carrying a train with French supplies and ammunition. Sister Sara plays an equally important role in these events: she wards off the Yaqui with her shining silver cross, cauterizes Hogan’s wound with gunpowder, and climbs the bridge trestle to secure the dynamite. Her rough-and-ready attitude hardly befits a nun, and the viewer is given ample clues that hers is a false identity. Hogan, however, is so determined to honor her holy vows that even her penchant for hard liquor and occasional cuss words fail to arouse his suspicion.

Hogan and Sara eventually meet colonel Beltran, leader of a small band of Juaristas who may be under-equipped but are tough, courageous, and die-hard Mexican patriots. Beltran likes the plan hatched by Hogan and Sara and they mobilize their forces to attack on the French national holiday. Unfortunately, the French are on their guard due to the bridge explosion, and the trio must figure out how to regain the element of surprise. Eventually they settle on a multi-pronged attack: Hogan will enter the garrison with Sara under the guise of turning her in, children will deposit an explosives-laden piñata outside the garrison door to blast an entry, and still more Juaristas will enter through an underground passageway between the garrison and a brothel, which to Hogan’s astonishment was where Sara was previously employed. The plan works brilliantly and amid a smoky blaze and chorus of gunshots, the Juaristas celebrate their victory. Hogan, now relieved of restraints on his sexual appetite, celebrates by bursting into the room of a slyly smiling Sara and hopping into her bathtub, cowboy boots and all.

Mexico is marked with lawlessness from the first scene of Two Mules for Sister Sara, in which three Americans are about to commit the unthinkable act of raping a nun. The national authorities are hardly better than these common thugs; the French military ascribe to the cold-blooded and arbitrary practice of executing its prisoners. Interestingly, the French intervention in Mexico portrayed in the film occurred when the United States was forced to turn its back on Mexico and suspend its Monroe Doctrine, too caught up in its own Civil War (1861-1865) for foreign intervention. In this context, lawlessness is perhaps not to be read as characteristic of Mexico, but a symptom of disturbed hemispheric affairs.

In this environment, individuals are needed to take the law into their own hands, the type of individuals that the Western genre thrives on. However, the heroes of Two Mules for Sister Sara are hardly moral exemplars. Hogan is a soldier of fortune whom colonel Beltran picked up at a Texas bar; his efforts in the Juarista attack are only motivated by his monetary reward. Sara is a prostitute masquerading as a nun so that Hogan feels obliged to help her; although she speaks passionately about the Juaristas when the film starts, it closes with her riding away in a lavish gown that betrays her material priorities. Even though the Juarista cause is portrayed as an extremely noble one, our jaded and self-interested heroes do not transform over the course of the film to adopt it as their own. Mexico merely provides the means for these off-beat individuals to come closer to achieving their ill-defined goals in life.

One-Eyed Jacks

When you’re trying to survive in the gun-slingin’ days of the wild west, sometimes you gotta be a one-eyed jack. In cowboy terms, this is the crook that lives off lying and cheating, but presents a decent profile so as to not raise any suspicion. You can always see one side of him, but beware of his deception.

The 1961 film One-Eyed Jacks, directed and headlined by Marlon Brando, begins in Sonora, Mexico, 1880, with 3 bandits robbing a bank. They jump on their horses with the bags of gold coins and ride across the surrounding hills to a near-by town. The relaxed demeanor of the crooks reveals how sure they are that they nabbed their bounty with no repercussions. Two of the men head to the town brothel while the other, Rio (Marlon Brando), who is a drifter and a trickster by nature, with his lightning-quick draw compensating for his slow, slurred, southern speech, runs off to a lady friend. He gets his way with any means available to him, even if it means coming up with a lie about his dead mother in order to steal a kiss. When the authorities ride into town, the men all make a break for it. One bandit is shot and killed while Rio and the third bandit, Dad Longworth (Karl Malden), ride into the desert. They hole up on the top of a sand dune so as to watch for the men coming for them, and then decide that one of them should ride to the next farm to buy fresh mounts and then come back. Dad is chosen to ride, but has a change of heart at the farm and decides to run off with the gold and leave Rio to his fate, as well as the years of vengeance which are to follow.

After seething with anger for 5 years in the Sonora Penitentiary, Rio escapes with a trusty Mexican sidekick, aptly named Chico Modesto. Rio’s one focus in life is to kill Dad. The two men search for him from town to town until they meet Bob Amory (Ben Johnson), who enlists them to help him and his partner Howard (Timothy Carey) rob a bank. When Rio states he’s not interested, Bob seals the deal by revealing that Dad is now the sheriff of the town that holds the bank. With that news, Rio’s in.

They ride 900 miles to the town and the first thing Rio does is head to Dad’s house. Dad is on edge, but when Rio makes no attempt on his life he calms down and then makes up a sob story about trying on that fateful day five years ago to make it back to Rio but instead having to flee for his life and become a town sheriff, turning over a new leaf. Rio knows he is lying about trying to come back for him, but says nothing and instead offers his forgiveness. After years of waiting for Rio to come kill him, Dad is overjoyed at this turn of events and asks Rio to stay for dinner, which is where Rio meets Dad’s Mexican step-daughter, Luisa. Rio is convinced to stay until after the next day’s fiesta, which is fine by him because the bank won’t be open until then anyhow. The distraction of the fiesta gives Rio and Luisa time to know one another, and by the end of the night Rio has seduced Luisa with lies and they spend the night together making love on the beach. The next morning, Rio, knowing that he’s a bandit at heart, admits his lies without remorse to Luisa and devastates her.

After riding back to town, Rio gets in a bar fight because he doesn’t like how a man is treating a prostitute, and ends up killing him. Dad, as sheriff of the town, can feel that Rio isn’t going to just leave without a fight, so he ties him to a horse post and lashes him with a whip. Then, to make sure he doesn’t try anything stupid in revenge, he crushes Rio’s gun hand with the barrel of a rifle, causing Rio to go into hiding up along the coast with his partners until his hand heals and he can get his payback.

After six weeks, Bob and Howard get tired of waiting for Rio’s hand to heal and plan to rob the bank by themselves. Chico tries to stop them because it will ruin Rio’s plan of revenge, but instead is mercilessly shot. Bob then tells Dad that Rio plans to kill him and that he should wait at his home outside of town. Meanwhile, Bob and Howard ride into town to rob the bank, but are foiled when the bank teller pulls a gun on Bob and kills him. Howard gets away, but Dad thinks that it was Rio’s plan all along. Dad and his men ambush Rio as he rides back to town and throw him in a jail cell to await his judgment and inevitable execution. Rio tells Dad he knows that he never tried to ride back to save him five years ago and calls him a one-eyed jack. Dad becomes like stone and swears that Rio will be hung the next day. Luisa later visits Rio in jail and reveals to him that she’s going to have his baby. Rio is overjoyed and confesses his love for her, no lies attached. She returns with a bowl of stew containing a gun without bullets. The deputy discovers the gun but leaves it on the table unguarded. Rio manages to build a contraption from his bed that can pull the table closer and recovers the revolver. He escapes after bluffing the deputy with the gun and is about to make his get-away through town when Dad arrives and starts shooting. With no other choice Rio shoots back, only to kill Dad as Luisa looks on. Rio scoops up the crying Luisa and puts her on a horse as they both ride away up the coast. They stop a good ways out of town and Rio explains how he has to leave so the authorities don’t hunt him down. He plans on going to Oregon but he’ll return for Luisa one day. Luisa, perhaps the only queen of hearts for this one-eyed jack, reluctantly agrees and waves good-bye as he disappears up the California coast.

This film is set in both Mexico and California in the late 1800s and it appears as though the American and Mexican cultures mix just as easily as the locations, with Rio falling in love with Luisa, as well as having Chico as his most trusted friend. Dad is also married to a Mexican woman, and even the fiesta mixes together a town made up of primarily white Americans with festivities of the Mexican and Spanish culture, including a dance of the fandango. The only one-eyed jacks in the film appear to be the Americans, while the prominent Mexican characters, such as Luisa, her mother, and Chico, all uphold strong morals and understand what it means to stand by those you care about through thick and thin. This sense of American precariousness is further shown when Rio chooses to hide-out up Oregon instead of Mexico, claiming that the authorities in Mexico would be on his tail right away. He chooses an American refuge over a Mexican one, clearly drawing the line between what the characters believe to be a country that houses criminals and a country that has no tolerance for one-eyed jacks.

Bandolero!

Bandolero! opens in Val Verde, Texas. It is 1867. Dee Bishop (Dean Martin) and his nefarious Bishop gang are finally captured, while robbing a bank and killing a man in the process, after a long history of crime and destruction. The town’s sheriff, July Johnson, is hard on crime, and sentences the gang to hang. The day of the hanging is the Bishop gang’s lucky day, because Dee’s long-lost brother Mace (James Stewart) is posing as the hangman and helps them escape. They ride off into the dusty desert, and Mace stays behind to take advantage of the fact that the town is empty after the hullabaloo, robbing the bank of $10,000 and making his own way out of town. The Sheriff and his men also ride out of Val Verde, seeking to hunt the Bishop gang down.

Dee and his gang find Maria Stoner (Raquel Welch), the beautiful young Mexican widow of the man they killed, and her carriage a few miles out of town. They rob the carriage and kidnap her. Suddenly, they are ambushed by the Sheriff’s men and there is a big shootout. The Bishops get away, taking a struggling Maria with them and heading south for the Mexican border. They agree that the deeper they get into Mexico, the safer they are from the Sheriff, whose dogged pursuit is mainly because he is in love with Maria and wants to save her. As the chase continues and the gang makes camp for the first night, the gang members start harassing Maria, but Dee protects her vehemently. Mace joins the gang that night. Though Mace hates Dee’s way of life, he plays the big brother role by constantly helping him out and trying to convince him that he is better than the scum he rides with. Here, we discover more about the beautiful Maria, who reveals that she was “a whore at 13, and [her] family of 12 never went hungry” and that her deceased husband bought her from her tiny Mexican village and brought her to his big ranch in Texas. We also begin to see some chemistry between Maria and Dee.

As the gang reaches Mexico, Maria warns them against entering Bandolero country, a region of lawless bandits who “kill every gringo they find.” It is Sheriff Johnson and his men, however, who are the first to encounter the bandoleros. The bandoleros hide in the rocks, armed with straps of bullets, sombreros, and handlebar moustaches; they drop down onto the men at the back of the Sheriff’s entourage and butcher them with machetes, stealing their clothes and horses. The rest of the Sheriff’s men get away and continue the chase. The Bishops, meanwhile, have found a ghost-town, abandoned by citizens terrorized by the bandoleros, and stop to rest. Dee expresses his love for Maria, who reciprocates. Just then the Sheriff’s men show up and capture the gang, turning the tables. Shortly thereafter, the bandoleros storm into town, shooting wildly into the air, and there is a massive shootout in which many men from all sides die. In the middle of the melee, the evil-looking bandit leader catches sight of Maria and tries to rape her in one of the abandoned houses. In his efforts to save her, Dee is stabbed with a machete. Mace kills the bandolero leader and then is shot. Without leadership, the bandoleros become cowards and ride off. Both Bishop brothers die dramatically, as Maria sobs nearby. The end of the film shows Maria and the Sheriff riding off back to Texas, having buried the dead men.

In Bandolero!, Mexico is a lawless, wild country of rocky deserts and abandoned towns where bandits rule and civilization is apparently absent. For American bad guys, Mexico is a place where they are safe from American law; however, the dangers of Mexico make this safety an illusion. The Mexican bandits are evil-looking, savage men who kill with machetes and shoot crazily into the air when they make their entrance. They force themselves upon women and generally wreak havoc, but when they lose their leader, they run away just as thunderously as they’ve attacked. The Americans, both outlaws and law enforcers, are familiar and comfortable in the harsh desert environment of Mexico because it matches their own; what is missing in Mexico is the law.

Maria’s character shows another aspect of the hard life in Mexico. Her story of prostitution at a young age and her purchase by an American for a price of “five cattle and one gun” is a heartbreaking one, but she tells it with a hard face and a hard heart. She says her father became “the richest man in the village” after she was sold, and that her life in Texas was easier than in Mexico; she was treated well by her husband. She is returning to her home country for the first time since she was bought, and there is no evident connection between her and her “compadres”; she is a fine and beautiful woman while they are a bunch of violent animals. Her softness and vulnerability show through in her sudden love for Dee, who also becomes softer in Mexico, repenting for his life of crime and making plans for a better future. Alas, these plans are not to be realized. Dee and his brother die in the dusty, lawless, and lonely place that is Mexico.