The Magnificent Seven

The Magnificent Seven (1960) is a Western modeled on Japanese director Akira Kurusawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), about seven gunmen hired to liberate a Mexican village from routine pillaging by bandits.

The Magnificent Seven opens with bandits, led by a scoundrel named Calvera (played by Eli Wallach), raiding a humble Mexican village while its inhabitants stand frozen and helpless. At their wits end, they consult their elder and he insists on confronting the enemy, sending them to the border to buy guns. The meek farmers are doubtful, but they go anyway. In an American town, the farmers witness two gunslingers called Chris (played by Yul Brynner) and Vin (played by Steve McQueen) displaying their valor by driving a hearse containing a dead Native American to the cemetery despite the ire of prejudiced locals. They appeal to Chris to work for them and he agrees to bring together some good gunmen, even though the farmers offer them a pittance in exchange. Aside from Vin, Chris succeeds in hiring a fortune-hunter named Harry, a tough Irish-Mexican named Bernardo O’Reilly, a reserved knife-thrower named Britt, and an outlaw named Lee. The six of them head down south and are trailed by an impetuous young Mexican named Chico, who Chris eventually accepts as a member of the group.

The villagers are too frightened to greet the foreigners and during the fiesta the next day the Americans merely watch and wait. They kill three of Calvera’s spies so that their presence remains secret. The following scenes depict the Americans working alongside the Mexicans to assemble traps and barricades, and to instruct them on how to operate guns. The Americans are portrayed as determined, patient and earnest teachers and the Mexicans as willing, but not always able students. Their first battle is a great success, due to catching Calvera and his men off-guard within the newly-fortified village, and they send the survivors high-tailing out. The victory fills the farmers with a newfound sense of bravado, but it is quickly dampened when they consider that Calvera may return. Cracks begin to appear in the rough-and-ready attitude of the seven. Vin yearns after the things he has sacrificed as a hired gunman: a home, a wife and a family. Lee has terrible nightmares and lives in fear of the final shootout when he will loose. Both the Mexicans and Americans argue amongst themselves whether to risk fighting Calvera again or reinstate the status quo. Chris and three Mexicans speak ardently to the others about the need to carry on.

When the seven return to the village one night, they are ambushed by Calvera and his gang, who humiliates them by demanding that they remove their gun belts and leave for good. With a surprising lack of foresight, Calvera only seized their guns to show the villagers who was boss, and returns their guns once the seven are outside the village. All but the wealth-driven Harry have become attached to the village, either for sentimental reasons or personal honour, and they return the next day for an intense shootout. They are outnumbered and casualties are high. Harry, who has a change of heart, is shot dead upon arrival, followed by Lee, Britt and O’Reilly. The farmers fight valiantly with nothing but chairs and spades, but Chris is the one to finally kill Calvera. In the final scene, three of the remaining seven are thanked by the village elder, and as Chris and Vin ride away, Chico turns back to remain with a Mexican girl whose infatuation draws him uneasily away from the footloose lifestyle of the older men.

The Magnificent Seven could not more clearly be an allegory for U.S. interventionism. Following cultural studies theorist Stanley Corkin, the film references a liberal interventionist model, one that seeks to improve social justice and material conditions abroad, and was produced when U.S. interventionism was viewed positively after the Korean War (1950-1953). At the outset of the film, the protagonist is shown risking his personal safety to ensure that the body of a Native American is treated with equal dignity. The task is apparently taken as a dare, but its moral undertones are clear. The personal motivation behind this act is not explained, nor is the fact that he organizes six other men to fight bandits in Mexico for a dismal wage. Moments before death, Calvera asks Chris incredulously: “You came back, to a place like this, why? A man like you, why?” The villain cannot recognize that Chris simply wanted to extend the liberties enjoyed in America to the Mexicans. These liberties include being free from persecution and also being free to accumulate wealth; it is emphasized that the village is poor because Cavera takes all of their surplus crops. This benign intervention has a cost, as is seen by the graves of the dead Americans. However, the final scenes show their success in leaving the village more peaceful, stable and productive.

The relationship between the Americans and Mexicans in The Magnificent Seven is incredibly paternalistic. The Mexicans passively accept being downtrodden by Calvera until the Americans bolster their courage, and they lack the gunmanship and strategy for counter-attack until given them by the Americans. This relationship of student/follower/recipient versus teacher/leader/provider is even expressed in the physical and verbal interactions of the two groups. The Mexicans are often seated when the Americans are standing, or in other formations that give the Americans greater stature. Often one American will address a group of Mexicans, and they will pipe up one after the other in a childlike fashion. The film does attempt to garner some respect for the Mexicans by suggesting that their bravery exceeds that of the Americans, having chosen the responsibilities of family and farming rather than being roaming mercenaries. At the same time, America emerges as a superior entity in The Magnificent Seven for its commitment to and capacity for delivering freedom to the oppressed.

Duck, You Sucker!

Duck, You Sucker! (1971) is the work of Sergio Leone, director of the famous Dollars trilogy starring Clint Eastwood. Despite having attracted little recognition in its day, it is one of the most interesting examples of how Leone splices political commentary into his movies alongside the locomotive explosions and wild shootouts.

Duck, You Sucker! tells the story of how a troubled ex-IRA explosives expert and a Mexican bandit become caught up in the Mexican Revolution. The movie begins with an abridged Mao Tse-Tung quote on how “revolution is an act of violence,” followed by the metaphor-laden image of a stream of piss drowning an ant colony. It is clear that Duck, You Sucker! will be no ordinary Western. The urine comes from Juan Miranda, a grubby and crude Mexican who catches a ride from a coach driver who wants to play a joke on his ostentatious passengers. Throughout the journey, Juan passively receives the demeaning insults hurled at him by the rich Europeans and Americans, but when the coach pulls into town and is seized his family of shotgun-wielding bandits, the tables are suddenly turned. Juan has all of them, the men stripped naked, dumped into an animal pen. Juan and his boys, fathered with an unknown number of women, take to the road and before long encounter John Mallory. Juan instantly tries to enlist him to rob the legendary Banco Nacional de Mesa Verde. John, aside from fleeing the British Secret Service for his terrorist activities, is escaping his painful past, which we periodically see in gauzy, dialogue-free flashbacks.

After Juan carelessly detonates a church that John has rigged, killing Mexican military personnel and a German mine owner, the two men proceed to Mesa Verde. Mesa Verde is in the grip of a tyrannical governor who conducts public executions. The pair descend into a dingy basement where revolutionaries, lead by a Dr. Villega, are planning a coordinated attack with Villa and Zapata. John is already in league with them and they tell the confused Juan to go ahead with his planned bank robbery. On the day of the attack, John detonates the bank entrance and Juan and his boys fight through the federal soldiers inside. After blowing the locks off the store rooms, Juan finds no cash but becomes an unwitting revolutionary hero; the bank was recently converted into a political prison and held 150 men, who now pour out into the streets. Later, in an encampment outside Mesa Verde, Juan expresses his resentment at being tricked into participating in the revolution. He assails John with a cynical rant about how a revolution involves “the people who read the books” discussing ideas around the dinner table and inciting “the people who don’t read the books” to loose their lives fighting.

This rant piques John’s conscience, leading him and Juan to attack a federal army contingent by machine gun then detonate the bridge underneath them. Meanwhile, there is a massacre at the encampment, including Juan’s six young boys. John solemnly observes while Juan grieves. When Juan is captured by the federal army, John goes into town and witnesses the revolutionary ringleaders being shot, noting that the ringleaders were betrayed by Dr. Villega. The next day, John rescues Juan on motorbike and they stow away on a train carrying the governor. Before long, the train is held up by revolutionaries and Juan shoots the escaping governor in vengeance for his children, elevating yet again his revolutionary status. Revolutionary leaders tell the duo that a military train loaded with over a thousand soldiers and heavy weapons is coming straight towards them, and they can expect no reinforcement. When night falls, John loads the locomotive with explosives and takes Dr. Villega on a kamikaze charge into the oncoming train; he finds that he ultimately cannot judge Dr. Villega for he regrets killing his Irish friend who too was an informer. The trains crash, with John jumping out just in time, and the revolutionaries finish off the survivors. John is shot the back; in the moments before death he returns the cross that Juan cast away after the massacre, then drifts off into happy memories of Ireland. As Juan frantically leaves to get help, John blows himself up in a death fitting to an explosives expert.

Duck, You Sucker! can be read as Leone’s protest against filmmakers who romanticize and sanitize revolution by avoiding the depiction of brutality and creating impossibly pure heroes. At the same time, he creates monsters of the Mexican governors and military colonels and the foreign capitalists, creating uniformly evil villains. These characters are thoroughly despicable, from the pretentious Europeans and Americans who have the manner and appetite of pigs, to the Nazi-like Mexican federal forces who drive in armored tanks and execute peasants en mass. Though Leone makes his political allegiance with the peasant class very clear, unlike many revolution-themed movies the heroes are selfish and fallible. This is true of John, who is haunted by having murdered his friend for a cause, and especially of Juan, who is considered a revolutionary hero because he freed the political prisoners and killed the governor, but he was first motivated by bank robbery then by personal revenge. In Duck, You Sucker! the Mexican Revolution provides a context in which to denounce the glorification of war, where killers can become heroes and friends turned into enemies. Interestingly, Duck, You Sucker! has a complicated release history in which scenes of violence at profanity have been edited out and later restored. It seems that when the movie was released in 1971, right in the middle of the Vietnam War (1959-1975), American audiences did not have a pallet for depictions of massacres and morally troubled heroes.

The Lawless Frontier

The Lawless Frontier (1934) tells the story of John Tobin, played by John Wayne, as he brings a crafty outlaw named Pedro Zanti to justice for killing his family and threatening the lives of frontier settlers. In some ways The Lawless Frontier seems like a straightforward Western of the white hat versus black hat variety (whereby the moral make-up of characters is denoted by their hat colour), but the fact that the villain is an ethnic mish-mash gives this story a strange twist. Zanti is half white and half Native American, but he disguises himself as a Mexican and speaks Spanish (unconvincingly).

The film begins with John Tobin discovering his dead parents after a raid led by Pedro Zanti, an outlaw wanted for cattle rustling and murder. Subsequently, Zanti is shown surveying a ranch for a future raid; he rides down to talk to its owner, an old man named Dusty, and Dusty introduces him to his attractive daughter Ruby. Zanti, decked out in a flamboyant costume and appraising Ruby with bulging eyes, is meant to be a sinister and lecherous character, but comes off as comical to the modern viewer. When Zanti reconvenes with his posse he states his plans to raid the ranch and seize Ruby as his prize; little does he know that Ruby overhears this and immediately warns her father. Dusty attempts to smuggle Ruby off the ranch, wrapped in heavy cloth and slung over a horse, but the horse falters at a river crossing. Luckily for the fast drowning Ruby, Tobin is present and dives off the river bank to save her. Zanti watches this, infuriated that the pair tried to trick him, and sends his gang to pursue them on horseback. They escape after a desert chase scene, thanks to Tobin diverting the gang and loosing them when he takes a spectacular plunge, still on horseback, from a cliff into the river.

When Tobin discovers that Zanti was the pursuer, the hunt for him becomes personal. Tobin returns with Dusty to his house, followed by the dubious sheriff who is obstinate that Tobin and Zanti are in league. Tobin succeeds in isolating Zanti from his gang, and a second desert chase scene ensues which ends in Tobin socking Zanti into an unconscious heap with one theatrical swing. Back at the ranch, the sheriff handcuffs Zanti to a bed, but within minutes Dusty crashes to the floor with a knife lodged in his back. Tobin and the sheriff investigate, but upon finding Tobin’s initials on the knife, the sheriff triumphantly handcuffs the dismayed hero alongside Zanti. Zanti squirms loose from his shackles, kills the guard, and is about to shoot Tobin when Dusty miraculously appears and shoots Zanti. In the Old West back-stabbings apparently count as minor flesh wounds. Zanti rides off with Tobin in hot pursuit, initiating the third desert chase scene. This one however involves Tobin luging down a man-made river, then pursuing a hobbling Zanti on foot until he collapses to drink from a poisoned watering-hole, then dies with terrible grimaces. In the penultimate scene, Zanti’s gang attempts to enter Dusty’s house via an obsolete mine-shaft, but Tobin detonates one end, trapping them inside so that they can be delivered into the hands of the law. In the end, heroism is duly rewarded as Ruby becomes Mrs. Tobin and Tobin becomes the new sheriff.

The Lawless Frontier does not take place in any precise geographical location, but on the imagined fringes of a nation where the rule of law is weak and decent folk must defend themselves from a myriad of enemies. However, exactly what constitutes the enemy is surprisingly uncertain for an otherwise straightforward movie. The archetypal good characters have nothing ambiguous about them: the damsel in distress, her devoted and jovial father, the brave and dashing cowboy. On the other hand, the bad characters of the sheriff and Zanti are more problematic. The sheriff is by no means evil, nor does he ever break the law. However, he has upheld a position of authority despite being inept at enforcing the law, a poor decision-maker and over-eager to exercise his power. The fault seems to lie not in this mediocre individual but the institution that bestows authority upon him. Even more intriguing is the character Zanti, who could just as well been a Mexican bandit, but the filmmaker stresses multiple times that Zanti is not Mexican. This film was produced in the years when Hollywood, committed to the Good Neighbour Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was cleaning up its projections of Mexico. In The Lawless Frontier the imagery of the Mexican bandit is still employed to denote threat, but it is only superficial.

The Undefeated

The Undefeated (1969) tells the story of ex-Union Colonel John Henry Thomas (played by John Wayne) and ex-Confederate Colonel James Langdon (played by Rock Hudson) as they cross paths in Mexico and become caught up in the Franco-Mexican War (1862-1867).

The Civil War (1861-1865) stripped many wealthy Southerners of their estates, including ex-Confederate Colonel James Langdon and his community of about four dozen men, women and children. With nothing to loose in the United States, Langdon accepts an offer from Emperor Maximilian to lead his people over one thousand miles to the Mexican state of Durango, where an escort will await to take them to Mexico City. Meanwhile, Colonel John Henry Thomas is resigning from the United States Army, taking ten loyal men with him. Thomas plans to take the men to capture wild horses to sell to the army, which will enable them to restart their post-war lives. After an impressive round-up of three thousand horses, Thomas meets with United States Army purchasers who make him a poor offer. Thomas smells a scam and sells the horses instead to representatives of Maximilian, who promise to make payment upon their delivery on the Durango plains. Both Langdon’s wagon convoy and Thomas’s herders cross the border into Mexico.

The parties become aware of each other when Blue Boy, Thomas’s adopted Cherokee son, spots the tracks left by the Confederates as well as a group pursuing them. They approach the Confederate camp and despite highly-strung Civil War tensions stay the night. Surely enough, they are ambushed they next day by Mexican bandits demanding that they surrender their supplies and women. The Americans dispel their attackers with the Confederates shooting from within a tight circle of wagons and the Yankees delivering a surprise attack on the flanks. The battle results in an incipient brotherhood between Americans divided by Civil War allegiances, a theme developed to a greater extent in the Fourth of July party that follows, and a secretive crush begins between Blue Boy and Langdon’s teenage daughter Charlotte. However, the mood turns ominous as the French cavalry escort to the Confederates is found dead, murdered by Juaristas, and Blue Boy is beaten up by a bigoted Confederate captain.

Matters worsen when the Confederates are received in a Durango town with great fanfare, but once trapped inside a court yard find themselves the victims of an elaborate Juarista ambush. General Rojas singles out an astounded Colonel Langdon to explain that the Maximilian-affiliated Confederates are considered Juarista enemies. He explains that because Maximilian could not acquire any more European soldiers to support his reign, he is bringing down Confederates after the Civil War. Rojas demands that Langdon go to Thomas, who is awaiting payment for the herd nearby, and tell him that he bring the horses or the Confederates will be shot. Though Langdon is loathe to ask anything of a Yankee, he duly meets with Thomas. Though Thomas’s men will lose their payoff, their Christian mercy and American brotherhood lead to a decision to help the Confederates. As Langdon’s men are being selected for execution, Thomas and his men rally the herd into motion with guns blazing and break through a line of French cavalry that attempt to impede them. Horses pour into the plaza just in time and Rojas halts the firing squad. In an unconventional conclusion to an armed hostage situation, the three men drink together, each toasting to his political affiliation: Mexico, the United States, and the Confederacy.

The Undefeated offers a good piece of advice for any traveler: know the political climate of the country you are about to visit. John is savvy about the dangers of Mexico from the beginning. When his men ask if he is expecting trouble, John replies sardonically, “We got Maximilian on one hand and Juarez on the other, and bandits in between. On top of that, we’re Americans in Mexico taking a cavy of horses to a very unpopular government. Why should we expect trouble?” Langdon, on the other hand, did not realize his role in this geopolitical mire until held at gunpoint. Many Western movies portray American cowboys blundering into Mexican wars and coming to the aid of the morally righteous underdog; in The Undefeated, Thomas surrenders the horses badly needed by the Juaristas, but he had to be coerced into doing so as he was closing the deal with Maximilian. Even though the Americans to not extend their moral responsibility to the Mexicans, nor do they change the course of foreign political affairs unless made to do so, the Juaristas are nobly portrayed. It is notable that despite having ambushed the Americans, General Rojas is portrayed as dignified and not cruel; he is visibly relieved to call off the execution.

Above all, the core theme of The Undefeated is unity. The toast given at the end between Rojas, Langdon and Thomas is symbolic of pan-American unity, a favourite theme in United States history since the Monroe Doctrine which called for the U.S. to be vigilant for European incursions into “its” hemisphere. If Mexicans and Americans can unite against the French, so too can the Confederates and Unionists unite against the Mexicans. The extended scene of the Fourth of July party during a hiatus from attacks from Mexican bandits and Juaristas shows how a body politic can be brought together despite its diversity both by symbolic national events and a common enemy threat. Also, Blue Boy and Charlotte make their mutual affection public, and this is well-received by both of their fathers. This union between Native American and white Southern youths seems to celebrate diversity and the coexistence of cultures, however in the final scene we see that Blue Boy has cut his traditionally long hair to the shortness of a typical Anglo-American boy, turning him from a symbol of positive inter-racial relationships to the power of white American cultural hegemony.

Straight to Hell

Straight to Hell (1987) is the brainchild of Alex Cox, a British director who was shunned by Hollywood after the production of his unconventional and politically-loaded film, Walker (1987). Straight to Hell, a homage to Spaghetti Westerns with offbeat humour and a punk rock cast, scandalized and bewildered critics, but attained minor cult status and can at least coax a smile from Sergio Leone fans.

Straight to Hell has a tagline promising “A story of blood, money, guns, coffee and sexual tension,” and though not having a plot to speak of, delivers generously on all accounts. The film opens with hitmen Willy (played by Dick Rude), Norwood (Sy Richardson) and Simms (Joe Strummer) botching a job and taking off with Norwood’s pregnant girlfriend Velma (Courtney Love) to avoid the wrath of their boss. As they are refueling their getaway car, they casually rob a bank then speed off into the desert. After night falls they spot a small town; they bury their suitcase of cash on the outskirts and decide to lie low. In the morning do they discover the strange nature of their hideout; Velma is accosted by a boy with apish expressions and a London accent who warns her that “bad men” are coming. Suddenly two pick-up trucks carrying a whooping band of marauders clad in mariachi suits descend upon the town. They have been out pillaging and plundering, but their loot unexpectedly consists of coffee beans and espresso-making paraphernalia. It turns out that the town is by-and-large populated by the gunslinging, incestuous, coffee-addicted McMahon clan, lead by the white-suited Frank McMahon.

The xenophobic McMahons quickly have Willy, Norwood and Simms in a gun-toting standoff. However, in a fluke the trio kills an American gangster who was threatening Bruno McMahon and Angel Eyes McMahon, earning Frank’s gratitude. Cox introduces the “sexual tension” promised in the tagline when Simms bursts into the hardware store, owned by a bizarrely French-accented couple named George and Fabienne, and sparks instantly fly between Simms and Fabienne. Simms uses a pretext to get George out of the room then the couple pounces on each other, neck-biting furiously enough to draw blood. The four newcomers are invited to the McMahon’s nightly ritual of coffee binging and singing around a banquet table. In the following days, the sexual tension mounts as the three men watch a scantily-clad Fabienne seductively soap-up her husband’s motorbike, Simms fools around with Frank’s wife, and Willy has a futile crush on Louise, one of Frank’s female miscreants. We are reminded that the trio are criminals at large when two Mexican police officers arrive to look for them. Another man shows up claiming to represent their boss, is scapegoated for the recent murder of Grandpa McMahon and hung in the town square. The audience can anticipate the final shootout scene when an American real-estate entrepreneur appears out of nowhere and bestows a suitcase of machine guns upon the three men.

On the final day, George shoots Angel Eyes who was trying to coax Fabienne into having sex. Thinking that one of the outsiders shot Angel Eyes, the McMahon clan mobilizes for a wild shootout against Willy, Norwood and Simms. The chaotic shootout, throughout which the McMahons keep slurping coffee from their little white mugs, continues until almost no one is left standing. The trio turns unexpectedly treacherous as a badly-wounded Willy and Simms hobble off to where the money is buried, leaving Norwood trapped in the cross-fire, and then Simms shoots Willy. Simms is then shot by Velma who has eloped with Frank, but their life as millionaires is cut short when they discover that their getaway car has no breaks and they careen off a cliff. The final scene shows the remaining characters departing from the town, Norwood and Fabienne in a truck of female McMahons and the boy with the London accent with a truck full of corpses, as the town is claimed the property of Farben Oil with a large new billboard.

In copying the Spaghetti Western convention of filming movies in Spain that are set in Mexico, Cox parodies how directors often use foreign places interchangeably with no regard for their geographic and cultural differences. For example, Cox makes it clear that Straight to Hell is set in Spain; the robbed bank is called Banco Central de Almeria and standing outside the town is the iconic Spanish statue of the bull silhouette. At the same time, the hardware store is full of Mexican knickknacks and the police officers look and sound stereotypically Mexican. Cox methodically manipulates and spoofs a number of the expectations cinemagoers may have about Latin America or Latin Americans. For example, the McMahons are clothed in Mexican mariachi suits, which is something American villains in old Westerns have been known to do, prompting the question of why this cultural garb should be associated with criminality. Whereas in many Westerns set in Latin America, the sought after resource is gold, in Straight to Hell it is coffee. This seemingly absurd twist prompts the audience to envision the modern coffee trade in the form of Old Western gold thieves.

Furthermore, Cox embeds a critical message about the violent underbelly of American corporations abroad. We notice that the American real-estate tycoon, after appraising that the town could be “just like America” once they build a 7-11, out-sources his dirty work to the protagonists by giving them suitcase of machine guns. We see no more of this character, but once the two factions have annihilated each other, his clean-up crews arrive and his company billboard is erected. Cox is famous for his condemnation of the American-funded Contra War in Nicaragua, another out-sourcing of violence by American foreign policy. For a film that some critics accused as one big “in-joke” for its cast and crew, Straight to Hell has a great deal of under-the-surface complexity.

Compañeros

In Compañeros (1970), directed by Sergio Corbucci, Franco Nero plays Yodlaf Peterson, a Swedish arms dealer who becomes unexpectedly involved in the Mexican Revolution. Compañeros has the extravagant shootouts and departures from realism typical of Corbucci’s style, but its most salient feature is a leftist political message that clearly condemns American capitalism.

The film begins with Yodlaf and El Vasco standing twenty paces apart, each with his gun trained on the other; as Yodlaf reminisces about how they arrived at this moment, the audience is brought back in time. It all began in Mexico when Vasco, who is a simple-minded peasant and Che Guevara look-alike, unwittingly won the approval of General Mongo, who made him commander in the town of San Bernardino. General Mongo is a two-faced revolutionary leader who is only involved for the money. Yodlaf, completely incongruous in San Bernardino with his refined speech and tidy apparel, has arrived with a train cart loaded with arms and ammunition to sell to General Mongo, but is soon accosted by student revolutionaries who ask him not to make the deal. They are acting in absence of their leader, Professor Xantos, who went to the U.S. to request help, but he was detained because the implementation of his revolutionary ideas would threaten American oil wealth in Mexico. Mongo, with revolutionary goals always second to lining his pocket, is desperate to open a gigantic safe that only Xantos knows the combination of. Yodlaf suggests that he retrieve Xantos from U.S. imprisonment, taking an unwilling Vasco with him, and that they later split the money inside the safe.

After crossing the border between the U.S. and Mexico, news of their massacre of eight border guards and train heist reaches the ear of an eccentric villain named John. John and his men ambush the train, which is carrying only Yodlaf, and he begins to sinisterly reminisce about when they sold malfunctioning arms in Cuba and Yodlaf let him take the blame. The Cubans nailed his hand to a tree and left him to die would it not have been for his hawk Marsha, who freed him by gnawing the hand off. In retribution, John leaves Yodlaf hanging by his neck with only a shaky barrel under his feet. Meanwhile, three American businessmen offer Xantos freedom if he signs away all Mexican oil on a ninety-nine year contract should he become president, which he vehemently rejects. The thwarted men then solicit John to kill Xantos; they offer an award of $10,000 and they throw in an envelope of “loco weed” to sweeten the deal. Vasco rescues Yodlaf and they hatch a plan to kidnap Xantos. Vasco enters Fort Yuma via a prostitute-carrying carriage, sets the fort on fire, and amidst the scramble to extinguish the fire the pair escape with an unconscious Xantos on a stolen fire truck.

Riding back to San Bernardino, the trio has a couple of near scrapes with John. First, John captures Vasco and tortures him by trapping a sharp-clawed rodent in an upturned basket on his belly. They evade John a second time when their attempt to sneak past the Mexican border patrol disguised as monks turns into a wild shootout. Finally, John captures Xantos and is about to execute him when Yodlaf and Vasco, aided by Xantos’s followers, demolish the firing wall and whisk Xantos to safety. The noble Xantos chides his young revolutionaries for taking lives during his rescue; an ardent pacifist and patriot, Xantos cannot bear that any Mexican should die violently. For this reason, Mongo knows that he can lure Xantos into town with the threat of killing a group of prisoners. Yodlaf and Vasco follow Xantos and conduct an out-and-out massacre of Mongo’s men, ending with the death of Mongo himself. Yodlaf realizes that there is no money in the safe after all and steals the relic of San Bernardino, hoping to glean some profit from this venture. As Vasco threatens Yodlaf not to take it, the end of the film loops back to the beginning scene. John shoots Xantos in cold blood, which prompts Yodlaf to launch the relic into a trigger he had rigged on his train cart of weapons, causing it to explode and consume John in flames. Yodlaf makes motions to leave Vasco and the revolutionaries, but he changes his mind, perhaps prompted by the destruction of his material wealth or perhaps by a sense of compassion. Upon seeing the Mexican military advancing, he leads the charge against them with the impassioned cry: “Vamos a matar, compañeros!”

In Compañeros, Corbucci used the most American of film genres to give an explicit critique of American capitalism. In the film, the U.S. government and big business work hand in hand to exploit the natural resources of foreign countries; the military illegally detain Xantos while businessmen pressure him to sign over ownership of Mexican oil. Xantos is clearly disgusted by their under-handed opportunism. Many Westerns have focused on the Mexican Revolution, and the heroism of their protagonists is amplified when they abandon their profit-seeking goals to help the Mexican peasant rebels. Usually the characters of these rebels are not fleshed out, but Xantos is well-developed both in terms of his character and his ideological soundbites. He preaches pacifism and has a deep love for his countrymen, but at the same time professes distaste for nationalism. When Yodlaf finally opens the safe, he finds that Xantos keeps inside a pile of humble objects to symbolize the grain, soil and labour that will eventually bring them wealth. The allusion to Che in the character of Vasco, who evolves from a buffoonish shoe shiner to a stoic rebel leader, completes the infusion of leftist values into an otherwise familiar Western context.

Django

Django (1966) is a lurid B-movie, banned in the UK for over 25 years due to its grisly scenes, but is also a classic in the Spaghetti Western genre for director Sergio Corbucci’s apocalyptic vision of the West. Django’s plot follows a similar course to Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), about a mercenary who arrives in a town with two rival factions, and by making selective alliances leads them to destroy each other in bloody warfare. This archetype was famously employed by Sergio Leone in his Dollars trilogy starring Clint Eastwood, but Django is tremendously darker than the Dollars trilogy in the moral conduct of its characters, the level of explicit violence, and even the physical environment.

As the opening credits roll, Django is seen dragging a coffin across a bleak craggy landscape upon a layer of slick grey mud. Most folks in the Old West traveled long distances by horse; most folks were not as tough as Django. The first scene is of a Mexican gang whipping a beautiful prostitute tied between poles in a remote desert. Unlike any other Western hero, who would have turned the horrific scene into a display of heroism, Django merely watches. Suddenly a band of red-scarved gunslingers shoot the Mexicans and untie the woman, only to accuse her of moral depravity and prepare a cross to burn her on. Only then does Django take pity on her, shoot her captors and take her to the nearest town. The town is a collection of decrepit buildings lining a street of churned-up mud; there is not a living soul except for in the brothel. The brothel owner, a nervous man named Nathaniel, lays out the local politics for Django. Death has loomed large over the town due rivalry between the Mexican gang led by General Hugo Rodriguez and the Confederate gang of Major Jackson; the main prostitute, Maria, vexed the gangs by seeking business from both of them.

Corbucci establishes Major Jackson as evil incarnate when his henchmen, wearing the red scarves turned into KKK hoods, whip Mexican peasants into running so he can use them as target practice. In the brothel, where Jackson charges Nathaniel an exorbitant “protection” fee, Jackson describes to Django his private fight for white supremacy, hanging on to the Confederacy despite the post-Civil War era. Sensing a shoot-or-be-shot scenario, Django kills all the Confederates except Jackson, inviting Jackson and his 48-strong army to fight against only himself. Based on a conversation in which Django expresses that Jackson has no right to think that Mexicans are inferior, one might assume that Django is a noble vigilante out to destroy the KKK. However, after a spectacular battle in which he whips out a machine gun from his mysterious coffin and plows down scores of Jackson’s men, we discover that his sole motivation is to avenge his lover’s death at Jackson’s hands.

General Rodriguez’s reprehensible character is displayed in a fantastically gory scene where he and his henchmen slice the ear off a Confederate spy, force it into his mouth, and then shoot him in the back. Surprisingly, Rodriguez and Django are old friends, albeit a friendship shot through with mutual distrust. This is most surprising to Maria, who is handed back to her torturers by the one man she thought cared about her. Rodriguez is awe-struck by the power of the machine gun and hatches a plan to rob Jackson’s gold in order to buy more machine guns to conquer Mexico with. Django helps to plan the heist, wanting a cut of the gold. They use Nathaniel’s traveling brothel as a Trojan horse; once inside Jackson’s fort, the Mexican gang bursts out of the carriage with guns blazing and make off with the gold. However, Rodriguez makes clear his intention to deny Django his share of the loot, so Django covertly fills his coffin with it and escapes, unwillingly taking Maria with him. Rodriquez catches up to them as they hopelessly try to retrieve the coffin from quicksand; he shoots Maria and orders a henchman to cruelly smash Django’s hands. The pair survives and Django deposits Maria at the brothel, leaving a message that he awaits Jackson at the cemetery. After many miserable attempts to prop his gun on a cross with his bloodied hands, Django kills Jackson and his men in rapid succession. He slowly walks away from the massacre over the crest of the hill, destitute and broken but liberated from his burden.

Django is a notable film in the Western genre, pushing the envelope for the depiction of graphic violence, and bringing a darker twist to Sergio Leone’s anti-hero archetype. As Django is an Italian-made film, its director makes an effort to replicate the conventions of American Westerns, but to an extreme and often at the expense of realism. Mexican generals and renegade members of the Confederate military are often cast as the villains of American Westerns, but Rodriguez and Jackson take the sadism expected of villains to such an extreme that Django was either banned or highly rated in many countries. Many American Westerns have a preoccupation with the U.S.-Mexico border, tending to promote the message of a closed border that can only be crossed by diplomatic negotiation. In Django, Jackson is leading the cavalry to chase the Mexican gang who has robbed his gold, but the minute in which the gang crosses the border, the cavalry stops dead in their tracks. Despite being in the middle of an unidentifiable wasteland, they halt on this invisible line and explain to an irate Jackson that they can go no further. This projection of the fixity of the U.S.-Mexico border is a staple of American Westerns, but in Django it comes off as absurd. The American West seen as abject and unsterilized through Corbucci’s eyes has made Django an iconographic film for the era of cynical Westerns. On top of creating a gritty antithesis to the clean-cut cowboy, Corbucci invented a macabre setting to contrast with the sun-parched landscapes typical to Westerns. In Django, with its dilapidated town which is home to no one but a brothel of sickly prostitutes, nothing avoids being caked in blood and mud.

Big Jake

Big Jake (1971) stars John Wayne as Jacob McCandles, a rough-and-ready cowboy who heads down to Mexico to retrieve his kidnapped grandson from the villainous John Fain. The film opens with an odd photographic sequence comparing the East coast versus the West coast at the turn of the century; while life in the East is comfortable and civilized, it is still wild and rugged in the West, with settlers battling the Native Americans and struggling against the elements. Yet another threat to frontier life is made clear when John Fain and his band of cutthroats descend on the McCandles ranch and kill practically everyone present. They kidnap youngest of the McCandles clan and thrust a ransom note at Martha McCandles, the stoic matriarch of the family. Martha receives offers of assistance from the army and the Rangers, but instead sends a message to her ex-husband Jacob, requesting his return to the ranch. Jacob left a decade ago, turned out by Martha for his womanizing ways, but he is not in the least perturbed by having missed his three boys grow into men. He is a straightforward, freedom-loving man who roams the country buying and selling livestock, solitary except for his uninventively named dog, Dog.

McCandles returns to the ranch, awkwardly reunites with his sons and plans to deliver the million dollar ransom to the location shown on the note. In what is perhaps a self-referential moment recognizing the obsolescence of traditional Westerns, Jacob, who stubbornly insists on riding horseback, is ignobly relegated to act as backup for the younger men who speed off in then-modern automobiles to save the boy. However, Jacob comes out on top when the men are ambushed by the Fain gang and suffer casualties, and only he presses on with his Native-American ally Sam, his two sons James and Michael, and the trusty Dog. Much time is spent depicting their voyage into Mexico, near the end of which Fain informs them to bring the ransom to a town called Escondero.

When they arrive at Escondero, they sense that the place is crawling with Fain’s men, so they create an elaborate ambush to kill them. Fain responds by sending for Jacob, warning that if anything is amiss when they collect the ransom the boy will be shot by a hidden sniper. At this time the sons find out that there is nothing but newspaper cuttings in the trunk, which at first outrages them, then they realize heroism inherent to the fact that Jacob refuses to negotiate with outlaws. It does not take long after they ride into Fain’s hideout for Jacob to initiate a shootout. This ends in the bloody death of Fain and his gang and victory for Jacob who recovers his grandson. In fact, the film ends with a sort of grotesque optimism. In the freeze frame of a beaming Jacob embracing his kin after delivering the classic line “Let’s go home,” there are two conspicuous absentees; these are Jacob’s long-time Native-American friend Sam and his loyal beast Dog, both of whom were hacked to death by machete and disturbingly forgotten by the celebratory heroes.

Big Jake fits squarely into a history of racial iconography that associates white individuals with mastery over nature through science and technology and other races with being “in touch” with nature, or existing in a “primitive” relation to it. The film highlights how the white characters are at the technological forefront of 1909; they compress time and distance with automobiles, make the seasons irrelevant with canned food, hunt with more advanced firearms and exploit natural resources with oil wells. In contrast, the Mexicans by and large blend into the landscape, such as women perpetually washing clothes by the riverside, as does the Native-American character, who materializes out of nowhere and is uncannily attuned to his surroundings.

However, despite the dearth of Mexican characters, Mexico is projected as a respected foreign power. The army general who offers to help Martha McCandles takes pains to describe how he has been granted permission by the Mexican government to make an incursion in its territory. Mexico and the U.S. are shown to be observant of border-crossing protocol, much to the dismay of the criminals, one of whom wrongly announces “There ain’t nothing they can do to us here” upon entering Mexico. The film also makes a point of holding a mirror to American racial prejudices by showing the more extreme prejudices supposedly held in Mexico. When the heroes check into a hotel in Escondero the clerk frankly states that dogs are allowed, but not Indians, and then a Chinese man is shown exiting a room. This ridiculous racial, and even species, hierarchy may shock audiences, but it is no more arbitrary than the hierarchy at the McCandles hacienda amongst the black and Mexican servants. Just as territoriality indicates sameness between Mexico and the United States, as both countries have strong state apparatus to maintain borders, so too does prejudice in that both countries have a self-entitled dominant race.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) is the final installment of director Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy, following A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965). The film centers on the mutually distrustful partnership between bounty-hunter Blondie (Clint Eastwood) and Mexican outlaw Tuco (Eli Wallach) as they compete against the mercenary Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) to find a buried fortune in Confederate gold.

Angel Eyes is fully deserving of his moniker “the Bad” for his ruthless efficiency in mercenary killings and his penchant for torture. The film opens with Angel Eyes interrogating a former soldier for the alias of a man named Jackson. Upon finding out that the name is Bill Carson, he shoots the man and his son. Angel Eyes is later told that a Confederate unit escorting a box of gold coins was ambushed by Yankees and though three men were saved the box was not; Jackson was among them and disappeared after the hearing, reenlisting in the Confederate army as Bill Carson and living with a prostitute named Maria. Angel Eyes locates Maria and smacks her until she informs him that Jackson recently left with his cavalry unit for Santa Fe.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to the slit-eyed, cigar-chewing Blondie (a.ka. the Good) and the loud-mouthed, hot-tempered Tuco (a.k.a the Ugly). They set up a scam to repeatedly collect the bounty on Tuco’s head by having Blondie turn Tuco in, and then shoot him from the noose at his public hanging. However, Tuco’s agitation from a near-death experience and Blondie’s realization that Tuco’s worth is capped at $3000 prompts Blondie to terminate the partnership, which he unwisely does by abandoning his ex-partner seventy miles from town in the blazing hot desert. Tuco survives this and becomes hell-bent on revenge, tracking down Blondie and forcing him to endure a similar ordeal. Suddenly, in the middle of the desert, Tuco discovers a runaway carriage filled with dead Confederate soldiers and a barely alive Jackson who croaks that $200,000 in gold coins is stashed in Sand Hill Cemetery. While Tuco, with a greedy gleam in his eyes, dashes to get water for Jackson, Blondie hears the exact grave where the coins are buried before Jackson dies. Because Tuco has only half of the necessary information, he disguises himself and Blondie, who has lost consciousness from severe sunstroke, in Confederate garb and takes him to be revived in his estranged brother’s monastery.

After leaving the monastery, they are apprehended by a Union cavalry unit and sent to the prisoner-of-war camp where Angel Eyes has claimed de facto leadership. Angel Eyes sadistically orders his henchman torture Tuco to the sound of a patriotic melody played by a military band. Tuco surrenders the cemetery name, but Angel Eyes knows that torturing Blondie will be futile so he leaves with him for Sand Hill. Both men escape from their captors, reconvene in a war-torn town, and win a shootout against men working for Angel Eyes. With Sand Hill just over the horizon, Tuco and Blondie stumble upon a Yankee encampment and pretend to be volunteers. The commanding officer is drunk in a desperate attempt to forget the tragedy of his mission; he must defend an insignificant bridge from the Confederates across the river by sending hundreds of troops to be slaughtered. Blondie wants the Confederates to leave so that he can reach the cemetery, but he is also moved by the pointless loss of life, so in an anarchic act of protest he detonates the bridge. Subsequently, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly arrive at the gold-bearing grave, and Blondie suggests that its ownership be determined by shootout. Blondie secretly unloaded Tuco’s gun the night before, so his attention is undivided when he shoots Angel Eyes dead. The film closes with Blondie hanging Tuco from a tree for old time’s sake and shooting him down when he is at a safe distance with half of the loot, and then rides away with Tuco bellowing curses after him.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the most celebrated Western movies, due in no small part to the profound images it projects of the tragedy of war. This is unexpected for a genre that generally glorifies United States history and justifies violence by the heroes. Taking an explicitly anti-war stance, the film portrays war as a failure by state institutions to work for the common good, creating situations that facilitate extreme cruelty (such as the prisoner-of-war camps) and allowing individuals to be collateral damage for dubious military gain (such as the battle at the bridge). This message, which has endured in importance long after the anti-war 1960s when the film was made, is important to the change in its critical perception. Time magazine critics, for instance, considered The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to be a “hokey” bloodbath flick in 1968, but today consider it among the 100 best films.

The development of the Mexican character Tuco is another interesting facet of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Even though he plays the sidekick to Blondie, he does not fit the sidekick archetype in the way that Angel Eyes fits the villain archetype, in that Angel Eyes is purely evil. His character has far more depth than Blondie, the stoic “Man with No Name” who has no relationships or history. Although, typical for a sidekick, Tuco is less intelligent and brave than Blondie and provides comic relief with his rambunctious behaviour, he is also far more accessible to the audience than the hero. Tuco is the only character with a personal life the audience can glimpse into (when Tuco argues with his brother at the monastery) and understand what motivated his criminal behaviour (out of dire financial need). As The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a European film imitating an American genre, there is certainly more room for the reinterpretation of cinematic conventions, including imbuing the crude-talking Mexican sidekick with greater pathos than the noble American hero.

Rough Riders’ Round-up

Rough Riders’ Round-up (1939) is one of the earlier films featuring the suave singing cowboy Roy Rogers and, like so many Westerns set on the Mexico-U.S. border, centers around a retrieval mission for an American outlaw gone south.

The film opens announcing that the Rough Riders have returned from Cuba, which was an actual American military force led by Theodore Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War. The men are sent to assist the border patrol in Arizona, where the gangster Arizona Jack has been raiding ranches and then hiding out in Mexico. The dilemma is that even though the border patrol chief wants to pursue Arizona Jack, a Mexican mayor reminds him that due to the present state of political tension he is unlikely to be given permission to enter Mexico with an army. When the Rough Riders visit a cantina, the chief orders the central characters Roy Rogers, Rusty Coburn, and Tommy Ward to detain a young woman traveling to Mexico and thereafter escort a carriage arriving from Mexico with $60,000 in gold. Unfortunately, a man working for Arizona Jack overhears this conversation and his gang brawls with the Rough Riders to make them miss the carriage. In the confusion, the girl escapes by hopping unknowingly into the carriage, Arizona Jack and his men chase the carriage down, rob its contents and kidnap the girl, and Tommy is fatally shot.

The chief holds Roy responsible for the casualties, the loss of the gold, and Arizona Jack’s escape and so suspends him from the border patrol. This is exactly the outcome Roy wanted, for his suspension means that he is no longer bound by border patrol regulations, and is thus free to bring Arizona Jack to justice. The villain, and his henchmen disguised as Mexicans, are hiding out in a small Mexican town. As soon as Roy and Rusty enter they are ambushed and locked in a room alongside the young woman, whose name is Dorothy Blair. She is fleeing from her father who disapproved of her marrying George Lanning, an employee at his Mexico-based mine. Unbeknown to the trio, Lanning is a crook who has been facilitating Arizona Jack’s robberies for a cut of the gold. Lanning tells Arizona Jack to let Dorothy go, but make it look like an escape so that he cannot be implicated. However, Roy sees through the deception. When Roy and Rusty escape, Roy sends Rusty to bring the other Rough Riders to Mexico, and goes to tell the Blairs that they have been swindled.

Arizona Jack and his men lay siege to the Blair homestead while Roy leads the father and daughter out the back door. Just in the nick of time, Rusty arrives with the Rough Riders and they round up the swiftly surrendering Arizona Jack gang. The final scene shows a fireside meeting with Roy and Rusty, the border patrol chief and the Mexican mayor, and the Blairs. The chief and the mayor, both accountable to the bureaucratic demands of their institutions, establish that they will be vague on the geographic details when reporting on these events so as to not cause strife between their countries. They also tell Roy and Rusty that they are willing to overlook their procedural “irregularities” and the hero receives a modest, yet grateful, handshake from the Blairs. It is fitting that in the film, produced during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, all is finally resolved in a "fireside chat."

For such a simple plot, Rough Riders’ Round-up has an incredibly well-developed geopolitical context. The themes of hegemony, interventionism and national security crop up throughout, themes that were just as important to Americans when the film was set (1900, post Spanish-American War) as when it was made (1939, beginning of World War II). The Spanish-American War was motivated by an American foreign policy that was expansionist and also sought to expel foreign influence from the hemisphere. In Rough Riders’ Round-up, the U.S. secured the Caribbean by replacing Spain as the regional hegemon, and then had to exercise diplomacy with Mexico while at the same time securing its southern border. The result is that the previously open border is sealed off with bureaucratic red tape. For example, Dorothy is surprised to learn that she needs a passport to enter Mexico due to border patrol being tougher these days, and when Roy hears her plan to evade the border patrol he sternly detains her. The military as well as civilians must respect closed border policy; while the countries are in a diplomatically tense period, the border patrol chief cannot take his troops south as he once did. Fortunately for him Roy Rogers exists, a hero who represents an exemption from non-interventionist rules in a time of crisis, and ultimately saves the day.

Rough Riders’ Round-up depicts Mexico as benign, but it does so in an unusual way: by playing with the typical negative cinematic portrayal of Mexicans, it makes a conscious attempt to confront the its viewers' prejudices. Western movie audiences, especially of that era, were accustomed to the villains being Mexican banditos. This iconography is present in Rough Riders’ Round-up, but in the form of the Arizona Jack gang disguising themselves as Mexican banditos. Viewers must adjust their expectations when realizing that the threat comes from Americans, not Mexicans. In contrast, the main Mexican character, the mayor with whom the border patrol chief is perpetually consorting, is represented as having a refined character and being committed to cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico. He rationally dissuades the chief from crossing the border, and then diplomatically handles the fact that Roy crosses it anyway. When Roy and Rusty are locked-up next to a melodramatically behaving Dorothy, Roy says to her, “Trouble with you is you’ve been reading the wrong kind of novels” and Rusty adds, “and this happens to be a true story.” In this scene, the film makes a self-referential jab at the exaggeration typical of the Western genre, positing itself as the truthful projection of the Old West and its southern neighbour.

The Alamo

The Alamo (1960), directed by and starring John Wayne, shares the same narrative elements of other films in its genre, but with the difference that it goes to surprising lengths to humanize the enemy Mexican army and show positive relationships between Mexicans and Anglo-Americans. The majority of this epic feature is not dedicated to the battle itself, which after all was a devastating American loss, but instead to the drama preceding it, which shows how American heroism lead to the creation of the Republic of Texas.

The film opens with a conversation between General Sam Huston and Colonel Travis that gives the viewer the key facts of the incipient tale. Huston has command over Texan armies trying to repel the forces of Mexican president Santa Anna, who is advancing northward to quell dissent among American settlers in Mexican-owned Texas. The problem is that these armies hardly exist, so he charges Colonel Travis with buying him time until he can assemble and train his men. San Antonio is located about two days ride from where Huston is encamped. This is where Travis and his twenty-seven soldiers are to hold off Santa Anna, who is rumoured to be marching with 7,000 battle-hardened troops. Soon Colonel Bowie arrives with 100 volunteers. Tension between the men is immediately apparent. Bowie missed the meeting with Huston due to a hangover and is incredulous that they are to protect the broken-down mission with their meager forces against the daunting Mexican army. More assistance arrives with Davy Crockett (played by John Wayne) and his band of twenty-three coonskin-capped Tennesseans.

Subsequent events serve to illustrate the characters of three leading men. Bowie is a rugged individual who is constantly rubbed the wrong way by Travis's upper-class airs and military formalities. Crockett is multi-faceted, able to play the eloquent ex-congressman when not performing his folksy attitude amongst the Tennesseans, and becomes the intermediary between the other two. While the Mexican army masses outside the Alamo's walls, an argument occurs between the men as to boost morale Travis wants to exaggerate the number of troops that one General Fannon is bringing to their aid, while Bowie detests lying to his men and wants to retreat. Arguments worsen when Bowie and Crockett takes matters into their own hands by leading the men to sabotage a militarily strategic Mexican cannon; the plan works out but Travis is infuriated and threatens to have Bowie arrested. However, the men learn to work together, coordinating to steal Mexican beef cattle, and despite having little hope of crushing Santa Anna and their jarring personality differences, each man decides to stay and fight for the Alamo.

On the first morning of battle, Santa Anna makes a surprising show of gallantry by informing those in the Alamo that they have one hour to evacuate women and children, and that they will be provided with transportation to a destination of their choice. The non-combatants leave, with the exception of Captain Dickinson's brave wife, after which the battle commences. Though a third of the American garrison is lost to casualties, morale is still high at the end of the day. However, the leaders know that Santa Anna underestimated them and will redouble his efforts tomorrow, and they receive the devastating news that General Fannon’s reinforcement army has been ambushed. Interestingly, Travis does not, as Alamo legend suggests, deliver a rousing speech about liberty and draw a line in the sand for loyal men to cross, but instead opens the gates and gives them honorable leave. Despite this, the men follow Bowie in standing by Travis, signifying their allegiance. The next day the battle takes place, a grim spectacle that claims the life of every American man. The film closes as the Mexican army find a terrified Mrs. Dickinson hiding with her daughter and a Mexican boy, but then stand to attention as she walks through them, over the horizon towards General Huston.

The Alamo fleshes out the personalities of the familiar American heroes, patriotically displays American heroism and commitment to individual freedom, and idealizes race relations. The latter point is carried through to a surprising degree. Unlike other Alamo adaptations which vilify Mexicans, this film both posits harmonious relations between Mexicans and Anglo-Americans, as well as uniquely humanizes its enemy. Bowie angrily jumps to the defense of the Mexican mayor when Travis treats him with racist suspicion when he offers information about Santa Anna. Bowie, who is married to a Mexican woman, speaks highly of Mexicans to Crockett when he says “they’ve got courage, they’ve got dignity, they ain’t afraid to die. And what seems important to me is they ain’t afraid to live. Today’s important to them, not the dollar tomorrow might bring.” Crockett also becomes briefly, but platonically, involved with a Mexican woman who alerts him to a stash of gunpowder and rifles. So the film projects a positive role for Mexicans in the Battle of the Alamo: not only are they friends and family of Americans, but they offer information and arms against Mexico in favour of Texas.

Even the Mexicans who are assaulting the Alamo are portrayed as fighting with the same bravery, dying with the same dignity, and acting upon the same sense of justice as the Americans. The Alamo goes so far as to strain the limits of credibility when, following the stress of battle, two men gaze admiringly down at their enemy and say: “Sure killed many a brave man today” and “Funny, I was proud of them, even while I was killing them, I was proud of them.” Santa Anna is portrayed as noble adversary, but the opening credits call his government “tyrannical” and an affront to the American values of liberty and republicanism. The Alamo still posits a battle between good and evil, with Santa Anna firmly in the latter camp, but not all Mexicans are connected to this figure. In this film Mexicans occupy contradictory positions: they are both friend and foe, foreigner and countryman.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Two American outlaws escaping to Bolivia at the turn of the century seems like improbable concept for a movie, but Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is loosely based on the real lives of Robert LeRoy Parker (alias Butch Cassidy) and Harry Longabaugh (alias the Sundance Kid). The history of this notorious duo is an amalgamation of fact, hearsay, journalistic sensationalism and American Old West mythmaking. What director George Roy Hill offers is a portrait of a powerful friendship that stayed true under the stresses of pursuit by lawmen who wanted them dead or alive, love for the same woman, relocation to a foreign continent, and the impossibility of escaping their past.

Early in the film, Cassidy (played by Paul Newman) explains his plan to Sundance (played by Robert Redford) to go prospecting in mineral-rich Bolivia. Cassidy is the brains of the operation while Sundance is a lightning fast gunslinger. When they return to the Hole in the Wall Gang hideout, a member challenges Cassidy for its leadership. Cassidy boots him in the crotch then appropriates the idea of robbing the Union Pacific Flyer twice, for its owners would refill the train with money not expecting a robbery on the return trip. After a successful hold-up, Cassidy and Sundance gloat on a balcony overlooking the mayor, who is ineffectually trying to rally townsfolk to catch the Gang. We meet Etta, who while being the devoted girlfriend of the gruff and reticent Sundance, has a tender relationship with the affable Cassidy. This is illustrated in a dialogue-free interlude where they ride a bike and monkey about in the countryside to the soundtrack of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”

The mood becomes darker and strained when, after they are surprised during the second train robbery by cavalry hired by the railway tycoon, they are forced into a lengthy chase sequence. The Hole in the Wall Gang splits in separate directions, but the pursuers follow Cassidy and Sundance. They are betrayed while hiding out at a brothel and denied amnesty by a friendly sheriff, who tells the pair of their inevitable demise. The posse tracks them through the night and the next day with amazing skill and persistence; the pair determines that among them are the expert Indian tracker Lord Baltimore and notoriously tough lawman Joe Lefors. Cassidy and Sundance are pursued over much terrain before being forced to jump from a cliff and be carried away by the rapids far below. They end up back with Etta and learn that E.H. Harriman, the railway tycoon, put together the outfit to stay on their track until they were killed. At this point they decide to go to Bolivia, and Etta states her intent to go with them, but adds ominously that she wants to be absent when they are finally killed.

The journey is illustrated in a series of sepia photographs. When the trio arrive in their Bolivian destination they are dismayed by its rustic appearance, and Sundance curses Cassidy for his harebrained ideas. They resume their criminal life after Etta gives the men Spanish lessons with “specialized vocabulary” for bank hold-ups. A humorous sequence shows the pair blundering through a robbery with a Spanish crib-sheet, and struggling to recite with Etta phrases such as “This is a robbery. Esto es un robo.” Soon their routine is perfected and they are living decadently, with wanted posters for the “Bandidos Yanquis” showing their notoriety. The honeymoon is over, however, when a potential sighting of Joe Lefors scares Cassidy into wanting to go straight. The men are hired as bodyguards for a humble and eccentric American mine owner, which they fail at when Bolivian bandits kill him. Being forced to kill the bandits shakes Cassidy, who has never killed a man, and the pair decide to return to robbery. Etta, perhaps with a premonition of their demise, leaves the next day. In the town of San Vicente, a boy recognizes a stolen mule and alerts the police to the outlaws. The police descend upon them, starting a climactic shoot-out in which Cassidy and Sundance are seriously wounded due to lack of ammunition. While the bloodied men are recovering strength in an abandoned building, poignantly discussing their next destination of Australia, the Bolivian military gathers outside. When the pair unwittingly exits the building, the camera captures them in a sepia-toned freeze frame to the sound of repeated volleys of rifle fire.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid enthralled the American public, evidenced by being amongst the 100 highest grossing films of all time (adjusted for inflation) and multiple Academy Award accolades. The pathos generated by the close male friendship between the outlaws, who are bound to meet with an untimely death, plus their fetching yet vulnerable female counterpart, largely accounts for the film’s appeal. However, the heroes are also partly conceived as Old West Robin Hoods, an archetype with universal appeal. Partly so because they rob from the rich and keep for themselves. In the United States, the noose of capitalism and modernity tightens around Cassidy, an older cowboy who remembers freer and simpler times; he curses the newly impenetrable banks, the immensely rich and powerful railroad barons, and the bicycle, a modern invention that threatens to replace the horse. He rebels against this by blowing up trains and appropriating easily and ill-gotten wealth, but then is forced to escape to Latin America. In doing so, Cassidy steps multiple decades back in time. Bolivia recalls California in the height of the Gold Rush, when humble but hardworking folk could become rich, not just aristocratic sons who inherit railroads. The charmingly outdated Bolivia is the only apt place for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, symbolic of the romantic frontier spirit outmoded by the modern commercial one, to meet with their inevitable death.

Somewhere in Sonora

Somewhere in Sonora (1933) stars John Wayne who rescues a man caught in the clutches of the Brotherhood of Death, a band of American outlaws operating in Mexico. Wayne plays a cowboy named John Bishop who is framed during a carriage race at the start of the film. A couple of crooks sabotage the wheel of his opponent, so when the wheel flies off mid-race and leaves its drivers injured, Bishop is instantly blamed and tossed in jail. A kindly gentleman named Bob Leadly helps him to escape, and he tells Bishop that his son Burt was also wrongly accused, which forced him to flee to Mexico and join up with the deadly Monty Black and his gang. Even though Bishop’s name is cleared the following day when the real crooks are found, he resolves to test the adage that no one leaves the so-called Brotherhood of Death alive, and gallops southward with his two buffoon sidekicks to retrieve Burt Leadly.

In a Mexican cantina, Bishop encounters Mary Burton and Patsy Ellis, who having been onlookers at the carriage race vehemently reject his company and call him a murderous outlaw. This is significantly overheard by Monty Black. Shortly thereafter, Bishop rescues Burton and Ellis from their runaway carriage, and accompanies them to the town of Paloma, home of Burton’s father the silver miner Mexicali Burton. They clear up the misunderstanding that Bishop sabotaged his opponent, which removes the moral qualms that were keeping Burton from being smitten by the cowboy’s suave advances. Meanwhile, Bishop overhears her father and General Ramirez of the Mexican federal army preparing to vanquish the Monty Black gang which threatens to raid his silver stockpiles. Bishop knows that he has to act fast to save Leadly, otherwise the army will attack the gang while he is still among them.

Bishop rides into where the Brotherhood of Death are hiding out and is approached by Black himself, who thinking that Bishop is an escaped criminal, invites him to join his rag-tag band of American outlaws. Bishop proves himself to be flawless in knife throwing, quick drawing and knife fighting and they allow him to participate in the raid on Paloma. En route Bishop secretly explains to Leadly that he was found to be innocent and that Bishop is here to retrieve him, but the young man reaffirms that no one leaves the Brotherhood of Death alive. As the gang enters Paloma, the filmmakers set in motion the classic save-the-day formula that will be acceptable to John Wayne fans, but preposterous to everyone else. Bishop releases Duke, his highly intelligent white steed, who gallops to the warning bell installed by Mexicali Burton and rings it so that the town is alerted to the infiltrators. Monty Black realizes that he has been double crossed, so Bishop and Leadly flee on horseback with the gang in pursuit. The pair hides in a canyon and a shootout occurs, but they are outmanned and captured by the gang. Black is seconds away from shooting Bishop when Duke leads the sidekicks, Mary Burton and the Mexican federal army to that very spot. This leads into a feel-good ending of justice being served to Black and love triumphing as Bishop and Burton embrace.

Somewhere in Sonora is a true crowd pleaser; it has a dashing hero, comical buffoons, a delightful love sub-plot, exciting action scenes and a noble animal sidekick. However, the film is also an explicit exposé on the merits of Mexico as a place for American investors and holidaymakers. The exposé begins in the cantina. The sidekicks see that the Mexican bartender is too lazy to sell his own liquour, so one hops over the counter and pours outrageous quantities for the cantina’s occupants. Bishop tosses the panicking bartender five bucks, not knowing exactly how much the liquor is worth, which thrills him because he can afford a nice fat cow with the extra money. This scene shows how far the American dollar goes in Mexico; a mere five dollars can buy liquor and livestock. Soon Mexicali Burton is introduced, the poster boy of American investment in Mexico. Burton is profiting from Mexican mineral resources and the Mexican federal army is committed to protecting his investments, even if they need American help to do it. It is noteworthy that the threat in Somewhere in Sonora comes from American outlaws and not Mexican banditos. Mexico is so safe that Burton gets his daughter to drive her own horse-drawn cart down to meet him! As well as being profitable and secure for investment, Mexico is portrayed as pulse-quickening and romantic, with the girls swooning in the moonlight-bathed hacienda to the Spanish guitar. Made in 1933, this film markets Mexico as a place where Americans can do profitable business with a compliant government and have a cheap holiday with abundant liquor and romantic settings, much like how Mexico is marketed today.

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.

The Man from Monterey

The Man from Monterey (1933) stars John Wayne as Captain John Holmes, an all-American hero who saves Don Jose Castanares from loosing his ranch to land grabbers and his daughter to a sham marriage in pre-Union California.

The opening scene presents the premise of The Man from Monterey: The unscrupulous Don Pablo Gonzales is planning to acquire the ranch of long-time friend Don Jose Castanares by keeping him ignorant of an ultimatum by the United States government that Californians must register their lands by a certain day, or they will be turned into public domain. To ensure that he can claim title to this land, Don Pablo arranges for his dull and pithless son Don Luis to marry Don Jose’s spirited daughter Dolores. Subsequently, the bombastic Mexican sidekick is introduced to the plot, who achieves comedic effect by constantly repeating his long-winded name, Felipe Guadalupe Constacio Delgado Santa Cruz de la Varranca. He teams up with Captain John Holmes after Holmes valiantly steps in as Don Luis is victimizing him. This is the first of numerous run-ins between Holmes and Don Luis in which the former proves himself the better man.

Dolores falls for Holmes after a spectacular display of chivalry, using his fine horsemanship to save her in her runaway carriage after its driver was shot off by bandits. Little do they know that the bandits were hired by Don Luis so that he could display his chivalry, but instead he watches impotently from the sidelines. Holmes, a cavalry officer, has been charged with informing Don Jose that he must register his lands, so Don Pablo hires some American thugs to detain him. A fellow officer shows up and threatens to arrest their leader Jake Morgan, but Holmes skillfully defuses the situation, thereby earning an ally in Morgan. Don Pablo ups the ante by having Don Jose kidnapped, and tells a grieving Dolores that he cannot help her unless she concedes to marrying his son, which she woefully does.

At first Holmes suspects the Morgan gang, but after pinning the kidnapping on Don Pablo, he hatches a plan to infiltrate the wedding. Don Luis’s mistress Anita is employed to masquerade as Dolores, which she does by remaining veiled until the vows have been taken, meanwhile Holmes locates and rescues Don Jose, making use of a cross-dressing Felipe as a diversion. A duel ensues between Holmes and Don Luis, and just when Holmes is being overwhelmed by men loyal to Don Luis, a bizarre psychic communication occurs between the cowboy and his horse, who gallops to the Morgan gang and brings them to assist Holmes. With the conspiracy uncovered and its perpetrators defeated, Holmes and Dolores throw themselves into an embrace which brings the film to a close.

The Man from Monterey is set when America gained sovereignty over California at the end of the Mexican-American War (1946-1948) and portrays its shifting demographic and political character. Firstly, Anglo Americans are moving into the newly acquired territory, which is not appreciated by the Gonzaleses, the younger of which sneers: “As far as I’m concerned, gringos are all robbers.” There is truth to this statement; the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) is one of the biggest land-grabs in history, when the U.S. forcibly incorporated almost half of Mexican territory. However, the filmmakers took pains to make U.S. hegemony appear benevolent; as Holmes explains to Don Jose: “The government has taken these measures for your protection, not to rob you. In no other way can we protect you from all the land-grabbers in California.” At the same time, Holmes tells the Morgan gang, “If I can’t persuade [Don Jose] to register his land, you can move in as fast as the law allows.” Benevolence only goes so far as American interests are concerned. There is a racial difference between the darker-skinned Mexican common-folk and the Hispanic upper class who fret about their land entitlements from the King of Spain; there is an implication that the Hispanic characters do not truly own the land, nor do the mestizo Mexicans, whereas the American characters speak of their right to it.

The supposed benevolence, orderliness and fairness of U.S. hegemony are embodied in the person of John Wayne. This establishes America as an idealized masculine power, in comparison with Europe, embodied by the incapable Don Luis, and Mexico, embodied by the servile Felipe. Wayne epitomizes the masculine ideal by being supremely competent in his every endeavor; he is a just and thorough lawman, a suave and successful lover, and a skilled and valiant fighter. Dolores pines for a man of “energy and ambition” and Holmes excels in both. The other male protagonists starkly contrast to the hero. Don Luis is a mean-spirited and deceitful person, so impotent that he stands by while Holmes steals Dolores and he relies on his aged father to carry out their plot. Felipe is emasculated on numerous accounts including his dog-like devotion to Holmes, his childish superstitions about fortune-telling cards, and ultimately donning the clothes of an old woman. These allegorical figures allow the spotlight to fall on Wayne, an icon that fuses Americanness and masculinity like few others have done.

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.