The Professionals

 The Professionals (Richard Brooks) is a 1966 Western made on a big budget that seems a harbinger of unseemly developments in action movies, a coarsening of sensibility that is now, I'm afraid, omnipresent.  The film is well-shot in a stony wilderness of canyons and playas that is so dry, sunbaked, and inhospitable that it makes you warm and thirsty just to watch this movie -- it was made in Nevada's Valley of Fire State Park and Death Valley.  Everyone is drenched in sweat and some of the characters complain of heat in an unseemly way that may be documentary.  In my view, the picture is pernicious in that it demonstrates in a vivid way how the lyric poetry of the great American Western can devolve into a mere "thrill ride" to use the modern locution.  The Professionals shows us that the landscapes of the West and the tough guys inhabiting them can be harnessed to cynical plots devised to deliver bloody and implausible massacres every ten to fifteen minutes.  The movie ramps up the body-count to astronomical numbers and cheapens human life to an asterisk on a box office revenues report.  It's a short distance from The Professionals to the Indiana Jones movies, better made spectacles that are also, mostly morally bankrupt.  And the film's focus on brawny male stars mowing down armies of faceless adversaries is integral to the Dirty Dozen, a particularly nasty war movie, made a year later and also featuring Lee Marvin as the world-weary leader of a group of psychotic scalawags unleashed on the Nazis.  The Professionals shows the Western turning into a spectacle of amoral, absurd violence, movies configured not to provide meaningful confrontations or ethically charged meditation on the Old West's seductive freedom, its outlaws, and the closing of the frontier, but, rather, meaningless special effects.  That said, The Professionals is well-crafted by a serious filmmaker (Brooks' next film was In Cold Blood), has interludes of well-written dialogue in the noir tough guy idiom of the fifties, and boasts a stellar cast -- it is because the movie is effective and earned a lot of money that it served as a dangerous precedent.

In 1917, during border troubles with Mexico, a wealthy man's beautiful young wife is abducted by a vicious bandit name Raza.  The bandit is a product of the chaotic Mexican Revolution and, apparently, once rode with Pancho Villa. Things have deteriorated in old Mexico and now the border territory is a wilderness of random violence, patrolled by savage brigands.  Raza wants to trade the kidnaped woman, who is Mexican herself, for 100,000 in gold coins, money that he intends to use to finance his own version of the Revolution.  As  in the Dirty Dozen, a group of mercenaries is recruited to raid the hacienda where the kidnaped wife is imprisoned, retrieve her from the bad guys, and, then, return over the border.  Four men are charged with this mission:  Burt Lancaster plays a roguish, ladies man who is also a dynamite specialist; Robert Ryan is a rancher with a soft spot for horses, apparently recruited to manage the live stock; Woody Strode is an African-American tracker and scout who kills with the knife and bow-and-arrow.  This crew of murderers is captained by the weary, cynical Lee Marvin.  Both Lee Marvin's character (Rico Fardan) and the dynamiter played by Burt Lancaster (Dolworth) were formerly soldiers with Villa and, in fact, former comrades with Raza, played with verve, by Jack Palance sporting a huge Frito Bandito moustache.  The four mercenaries traverse nightmarishly barren country, now and then, encountering sinister brigands whom they slaughter.  An armored train is attacked by Raza's guerillas in a scene that presages some of the action in later movies in the Indiana Jones series and the Mad Max movies.  The Professionals has pretensions to seriousness and there is a disturbing scene in which the captured Federales are murdered by Raza's men and their commanders lynched from a convenient utility pole -- "convenient" I say because this part of Mexico had no electrical power when I first visited it in the eighties and the movie takes place fifty years earlier.  We learn that Fardan's Mexican wife was tortured to death by the government and that he is conflicted about the goal of their mission which is to thwart a formerly valiant guerilla fighter in the opposition.  The heroes attack Raza's compound, seemingly an old mining camp, and many Mexicans are slaughtered.  Of course, the rich man's wife played by Claudia Cardinale was not kidnaped and has returned to Mexico voluntarily to consort with Raza who is her lover.  There's a lot of rape innuendo with Claudia Cardinale sulking for the camera and running around half naked and, then, some light bondage when she has to be tied-up and dragged kicking and screaming across the wasteland.  Raza's band chases the mercenaries and there are a number of impressive shoot outs, train chases (the good guys have seized the locomotive captured by Raza's men) and, finally, Dolworth volunteers to make a desperate rear-guard defense of a slot canyon to buy time for his comrades to get the protesting wife over the border.  The fight in the canyon in which Dolworth fends off six guerillas, led by Raza and a woman warrior Si Si Chiquita ("she never says no") has some weird erotic overtones -- it's not clear if Dolworth is more in love with Raza than Si Si Chiquita (with whom he has had an affair) and there's a bizarre "Lust in the Dust" scene in which the desperately wounded woman and her former paramour alternately try to kill one another while also lustily embracing for old times sake.  (It's like parody of a parody, that is, a riff on the scenes with Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck shooting it out in King Vidor's Duel in the Sun.)  Dolworth, who now has become some sort of idealist, brings the wounded Raza to the border.  The boys refuse to surrender Claudia Cardinale to her husband, opting instead to forego their nine-thousand dollar bounties (apparently they keep the downpayment of one grand a head) and ride off into Old Mexico with Raza and her girlfriend in tow.  This sort of ending in which the mercenaries see the error of their ways, forego their payment and, sometimes, even slaughter their bosses is pretty standard in pictures of this sort -- for instance, The Dogs of War.  

The movie is astonishingly racist -- the Mexican brigands always grin and leer as they treacherously plot to murder the gringos.  Si Si Chiquita is a stereotype who has to be seen to be believed.  For some reason, the Mexican guerillas never sleep but spend all night strumming guitars, singing, dancing around bonfires, and getting riotously drunk on tequila.  Better films cast Mexican performers in these kind of stereotypical roles (which is not necessarily a good thing) -- for instance, Peckinpah used Emilio "Indio" Fernandez  in the role of the wicked general, that part played here by Jack Palance and, of course, Claudia Cardinale is implausible as a Mexican villager.  (She does much better as the immigrant wife in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West which imitates many scenes in the this film and, also, features Woody Strode waiting for a train -- a sequence that Leone develops at operatic length from what is just a throw-away shot in The Professionals.)  A sequence in which, for some reason, the heroes try to escape in mining carts on narrow gage rails was imitated by Steven Spielberg in The Temple of Doom, one of his Indiana Jones' pictures.  Brooks writes good dialogue when his characters aren't blowing stuff up with dynamite strapped to arrows.  Poor Si Si Chiquita shot down in a hail of bullets and voluptuously succoured by Burt Lancaster laconically remarks that "I'm not lucky today."  There is a weird, but impressive speech about revolutions being like love affairs that is much better than it sounds.  At the end of the picture there's an exchange of insults that sounds like something from a Restoration comedy:  "You bastard," the aggrieved husband shouts at Lee Marvin; he replies:  "In my case an accident of birth, but, you, sir are a self-made man."  Early in the movie, the boys have to travel at night and there is some gorgeous day-for-night footage with the horses stirring up big clouds of silvery dust.  There are some beautiful horse-chases and, more than a little, unsuccessful studio footage with the characters lounging around fires next to fake cactus and painted backdrops -- stuff that I find endearing in a big Hollywood blockbuster of this sort.