Bandolero!

Dean Martin and Raquel Welch

This review contains spoilers.

Andrew V. McLaglen's Bandolero! is an unexceptional Western from 1968. The film was conceived by Twentieth Century Fox as a package that reunited McLaglen with the star of his 1965 hit Shenandoah, Jimmy Stewart. Bandolero! also boasts two other key contributors from Shenandoah: screenwriter James Lee Barrett and cinematographer William Clothier. Dean Martin, then still a major star, was tabbed to play Stewart's brother and George Kennedy, coming off a key supporting role in Cool Hand Luke for which he would win a supporting Oscar, got the somewhat thankless role of a sheriff trying to bring the outlaw brothers to justice. Raquel Welch, who was being heavily promoted as a budding star by the studio, plays Martin's romantic interest. The film is greatly helped by its plethora of familiar faces in supporting roles: including Dub Taylor, Harry Carey Jr., Will Geer, Denver Pyle, and Guy Raymond. 

The film has its merits. Clothier's efforts are almost always sterling and Jerry Goldsmith's score, which tips its hat to but is not derivative of Leone, is one of his best. Stewart is outstanding. His teary response to the death of his brother is very effective and he drolly handles the film's attempts at humor. Kennedy is also quite good. His rapport with his deputy, played by Andrew Prine, is one of the highlights of the film. Prine is a familiar face to fans of 1960s and 70s Westerns and action films, but he was not a distinctive enough personality to rise to stardom. He was a good looking guy, he even appeared in a centerfold for Viva magazine, but was too friendly and easy going to exude the machismo that denotes a sex symbol in Hollywood. Bandolero! was one of the better vehicles for his talents, but I feel McLaglen muffs his death scene and Kennedy's resultant reaction.

There is no escaping that McLaglen was a second rate talent. That said, Bandolero!, along with McClintock!, The Shadow Riders, and Shenandoah, is one of his better films. His subsequent films with John Wayne, including The Undefeated and Chisum, are particularly feeble efforts. McLaglen, as he himself noted, was not suited to be, despite his background, the successor to John Ford. The Hawksian first third of Bandolero! works better than the Fordian remainder. He is a desultory action director. The violence in Bandolero! lacks verve and menace. Scenes that should thrill, like the Mexican bandits gamboling down a sandy hill on horseback, just sort of sit there. The pre-credit bank robbery sequence, in which Dean Martin and his gang are thwarted by George Kennedy's Sheriff, does have some snap to it. As do the subsequent scenes in which Stewart, disguised as a circuit riding hangman, frees the miscreants. 

Bandolero!'s satire of frontier justice is one indication that James Lee Barrett was attempting to expand the concerns of his scripts by addressing more adult and complex themes. Another is the back story that Martin's character was one of Quantrill's Raiders, a fact that his brother, who fought for the North, holds against him. I'd rather not go into the full story of Quantrill's Raiders, who included Cole Younger and Frank and Jesse James, but, suffice to say, they were the closest thing the Confederacy had to a terrorist group. Martin's character is seeking some form of redemption for his past misdeeds and wanting to escape the life of an outlaw. This kind of character is outside the ken of what Martin could do. He could play a drunk trying to reform, but not a bloodthirsty killer.

Raquel Welch is, no surprise, even more of problem in the film. During the final shootout, when she has to fight off an attempted rape, she is up to the physical challenges of the role. Her character is Hispanic, so given Welch's heritage, her father was from Bolivia, this is a good fit for her. However, Welch was never adept at dialogue and moments that a better thespian could have handled become howlers:

              I was a whore at thirteen and my family of twelve never went hungry.

                                How does a man become an animal like you!

                                                    I am not a gringo.

Etc. Welch plays a former prostitute sold for five cows and a gun.

The lesser two thirds of the film are in vigilante pursuit mode as the Sheriff and his posse chase the outlaws across the Rio Grande. In some ways, this means Bandolero! anticipates 1969's The Wild Bunch. However, whatever one thinks of Peckinpah, Bandolero! has dated far worse than The Wild Bunch. Despite Clothier's handsome cinematography, the payoff action scenes, with paint red splotches of blood and cartoonish carnage, seem more ludicrous than intense. The film build little suspense over the fates of the character, which is a pity because Stewart and Martin's characters are killed off in the end. McLaglen was hemmed in by having to make a family Western aimed, as Philip French sagely noted, at the silent majority.✂ The studio marketed the film heavily in what we now call red states. It opened in Texas, but. overall, only did mediocre business. 

Over the course of American history, the romanticization of outlawry rises as economic fortunes fall. The rise of dime novels and penny dreadfuls, referred to knowingly in Bandolero!, accelerated after the Panic of 1873. Prohibition and the Crash of 1929 helped bring about the Hollywood gangster film which would result in the rise of tough and rebellious leading men like Cagney and Bogart. Even a rural bumpkin like Henry Fonda often played figures on the outskirts of society before he enlisted in World War 2: You Only Live Once, Jesse James, The Return of Frank James, The Grapes of Wrath. Is all well with American society if Henry Fonda is a sympathetic criminal? It is not insignificant that when Fonda returned from service he starred as Wyatt Earp in former OSS poohbah John Ford's My Darling Clementine. The Pax American era needed new heroes to keep law and order.

The tumult of the Sixties and the subsequent economic dislocation again turned things topsy-turvy. The popularity of 1967's Bonnie and Clyde signaled to the staid film industry that authority figures were out and that social banditry was back in fashion. Until 1977's Star Wars and despite the Thermidorian reaction of Dirty Harry and his ilk, the outlaw would reign supreme in the daze of easy riders and psycho killers. Times were changing and old stars would have to adapt. Dino himself, reacting to Beatlemania, had crossed over into Country and Western, successfully, in 1965 with Lee Hazelwood's "Houston". Martin's and Jimmy Stewart's film careers were on the downslope, though. as was the Western genre itself. Bandolero! is, thanks to the majority of its cast, pleasant viewing, but it is more of historic interest, as a transitional Western, than as a example of film artistry. 

✂ Phillip French, Westerns, pg.31