Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood’s second collaboration jocousely teams Eastwood's Leone-sque soldier-of-fortune Hogan (scarcely changing his apparel and paraphernalia from Leone’s Dollars Trilogy) with Shirley MacLaine’s sister Sara against an extensive western landscape, to fight for a good cause, aiding Mexico’s Juarista rebels to assail the colonial French army during 1860s.
Let’s just turn a blind eye on the self-conscious revisionist stance about colonialism, the movie's appeal is right on its game when conjuring up the odd pairing of a devout nun and a cynical atheist, from a skin-baring introduction of Sara, on the point of being gang-raped, to the reveal of her votary attire which amusingly takes Hogan aback, until they soften their discrepancy and clearly Hogan is swept off his feet by her prim but valiant defiance. And the cunning machination to keep a lid on the real identity of a heart-of-gold Sara is well-wrought through her unfeigned piety and devotion (including a Christian burial for her assaulters), but Siegel slyly leaves small clues to insinuate there is something iffy in train - Sara’s secretive cigar-smoking and she apparently makes no bones about uttering one particular profane word - to keep audience intrigued, and Ms. MacLaine makes Sara a ballsy heroine through and through, she will soon proactively return the favor to save Eastwood’s perpetually squinting Hogan, not once but twice, and successfully pulls the wool over his (and our) eyes as a hardened, trestle-climbing partisan who is off-limits to no man but God himself.
Alas, what the film (predictably yet regretfully) fails to make right is the ill-treatment of the Mexican counterpart, it is a story happening in their land, but the movie never for one second, delves into their mindset, Col, Beltrán (Fábregas) is a one-note cipher and his army is a bunch of rabbles, not to mention that the climatic garrison-sallying action pieces are starkly rinky-dink and finish in abruptness, but a grace note is maestroMorricone’s lilting and clanging accompaniments, ever so pervasive in a boisterous, above-average Hollywood fluff.
referential points: Don Siegel’s THE BEGUILED (1971, 7.3/10), THE KILLERS (1964, 5.3/10); Sergio Leone's THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1966, 8.3/10), ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968, 8.4/10).
