Benedito Dias Rodrigues
Bravados it's one those movies to never forget,so powerful and so compelling,Peck is sad laconic and cold guy pursuing remorseless revenge,but the persecution is long and without respite,along the way he became a judge,each bad man has your final day,but in the end he found the awful truth,the killer was nearby the fence,excellent casting as still unknown Lee Van Cleef,Henry Silva and Joe De Rita in weird role,noteworthy is also a beautiful Mexican landscape,atypical western and essential for those love the real cinema!! Resume: First watch: 2007 / How many: 2 / Source: DVD / Rating: 8
James Hitchcock
A stranger named Jim Douglas rides into the town of Rio Arriba, where four men are due to be hanged for murder the following morning. When questioned about his business he states that he has come to watch the hanging, but gives no further explanation. When the four break out of jail the morning before their execution, Douglas joins the posse charged with hunting them down and bringing them back dead or alive. Eventually Douglas's motives become clear. He believes that these are the men who raped and murdered his wife six months earlier and whom he has been pursuing ever since. He manages to track the men down and succeeds in killing three of them. When, however, he is confronted with the fourth he learns something which makes him question his assumptions. "The Bravados" has a lot in common with a number of other Westerns from the fifties, notably some of the Anthony Mann/James Stewart Westerns such as "The Naked Spur" and John Ford's "The Searchers". (Shots in which Gregory Peck and Joan Collins are seen framed in a doorway may be a deliberate reference by director Henry King to a famous shot in "The Searchers"). Like Stewart and John Wayne, Peck was normally associated with playing sympathetic characters, but all three had another side to their talents, and as Stewart had done in "The Naked Spur" and Wayne in "The Searchers", Peck here plays a man who is much more morally ambiguous. In some ways Douglas has much in common with Peck's Captain Ahab in "Moby Dick" from two years earlier. Both men are haunted by a desire for revenge and ruthless in their pursuit of a quest which threatens to destroy them. What Douglas learns from the fourth man, of course, is that that these were not the men who killed his wife. When he discovers this he experiences deep feelings of shame and guilt for killing three men for something they didn't do. This does not mean, however, that Douglas has wiped out three innocent, law-abiding citizens. They were, after all, already under sentence of death, presumably for a murder- we never discover whose- and the posse would have been legally entitled to kill them even if they had not committed several more capital crimes in the course of their escape. Legally, therefore, Douglas has done the right thing. What troubles him is his motive for doing it. As T.S Eliot put it:-"The last temptation is the greatest treason, To do the right thing for the wrong reason". "The Bravados" came out in the same year, 1958, as another great Gregory Peck Western, "The Big Country". Of the two I would probably rank "The Big Country" slightly higher, largely because it is an ensemble film with great performances coming not only from Peck but also from (among others) Burl Ives, Charlton Heston and Jean Simmons. "The Bravados" is more of a solo effort; the four men Douglas is tracking down never really emerge as individuals in their own right, except possibly for the last, Lujan, even though two of the actors playing them, Lee Van Cleef and Stephen Boyd, later went on to become stars. Joan Collins seems rather miscast as Douglas's love-interest Josefa Velarde. Josefa's name suggests that she is of Mexican origin, but Joan always seems too much the upper-class English lady. Peck, however, is excellent. Although Douglas, like Ahab, is involved in an obsessive quest for revenge, he is, unlike Ahab, a loner. He is ostensibly calm, but we can sense that beneath the surface he is inwardly burning with anger. The immensity of the wrong he has suffered, however, means that we never lose sympathy with him.The film's other advantages are some striking photography and a fine, stirring musical score. Overall this is an excellent, thought-provoking Western and I am always surprised that it remains so little known compared to something like "The Searchers". 8/10
ferbs54
"The Big Country," the second Western that Gregory Peck appeared in in 1958, was released in October of that year; a big, sprawling, almost-three-hour epic that is very well known today, despite its middling reputation (still, it remains one of this viewer's all-time personal faves). Peck's first Western of that year, however, June's "The Bravados," was a much smaller film, and one largely forgotten today by the general public. And that is a shame, as a recent viewing has served to remind me of what a high-quality picture this is, and one with a message that it would be well to remember.In the film, we first encounter Peck's Jim Douglas character as he rides into the small town of Rio Arriba, to witness the hanging of four outlaws. Though temperamentally disinclined to talk (indeed, Douglas may be one of the most dour characters that Peck ever essayed), he soon lets it slip that these bad men are in some way responsible for the recent rape and murder of his wife. When the four outlaws break jail and escape, with the help of a confederate posing as the hangman (and played, against type, by Joe De Rita, a year before he would become "Curly Joe" De Rita with The Three Stooges!), Douglas, grimmer than ever, vows to hunt them down and kill them one by one, and, leading the Rio Arriba posse, gallops off to do so. While Jim McKay, the Peck character in "The Big Country," was slow to get involved in community disputes, Jim Douglas is perhaps a little TOO eager to jump into the fray...."The Big Country" takes its time in letting us learn about its characters, its leisurely exposition only rarely punctuated by bursts of action (at least, until its awesome double duel in the film's final 20 minutes). "The Bravados," on the other hand, is a much more compact affair, and its final 2/3 are fairly relentless in the action department. The film also features a twist ending of sorts--one of fairly intense emotional impact, I must say--that goes far in making some kind of statement vis-a-vis violence; the larger film sent a similar message home, without the twist ending. Both films feature fairly spectacular scenery ("The Bravados" having been shot in Mexico; "The Big Country," in Arizona and California) and make excellent use of the wide screen; how impressive they must have looked in movie houses back when (I HAVE seen "The Big Country" in a theater and it WAS an awesome experience!). Peck, excellent as usual as Jim Douglas, was here directed for the fifth time by 40-year Hollywood veteran Henry King, who would only direct three more films after this one; he and Peck had previously collaborated on "Twelve O'Clock High," "The Gunfighter" (one of the Western genre's universally acknowledged champs), "David and Bathsheba" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (those last two costarring "The Brooklyn Bombshell," Susan Hayward), and would go on to make "Beloved Infidel" the following year. King, as usual, proves to be quite the craftsman here. The impressive lensing of Leon Shamroy, the renowned cinematographer whose filmography is just too lengthy to go into, adds immeasurably to the stunning look of the film, and the moody and effective score by Lionel Newman works wonders, too (although it is hardly in the same league as the truly classic score that Jerome Moross composed for "The Big Country").Like the bigger, splashier picture, "The Bravados" also sports a first-rate cast, and the four bad men of the film's title are played by Stephen Boyd (one year, of course, pre-"Ben-Hur"), Albert Salmi (a great character actor, here in one of his earliest roles), Lee Van Cleef (10th billed here!) and Puerto Rican Henry Silva (playing a Mexican Indian, and whose final scene with Peck is perhaps the finest in the film). And then there is Peck's "love interest" in the picture, Josefa, played by the 25-year-old Joan Collins, and looking absolutely smashing, of course. Viewers would have to wait a full 24 years, till the 1982 TV movie "The Wild Women of Chastity Gulch," to see Collins again in a Western context. And yes, she is quite good here, playing a woman who is almost like a Madonna (and I use that word with its original meaning, the film, incidentally, having a curious religious bent), and as far from the Alexis Carrington Colby Dexter, etc. super-bitch persona as can be imagined. How interesting it is to see Collins sip from a mug of beer, rather than from a champagne flute! Another element to admire in the film is its seeming realism. I love the scenes in which characters converse in Spanish, with no subtitles provided, while the non-Spanish-speaking viewer (such as myself) has no problem understanding what is being said. John Huston employed the same device 10 years earlier in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (still my all-time favorite film) and the effect is the same here: an engendering of realism and authenticity. The bottom line: As it turns out, in regard to "The Big Country," "The Bravados" can, after all these years, hold its head very high next to its bigger, younger and more popular brother!
