THE BRAVADOS (1958)

Along with James Stewart and Anthony Mann, director Henry King and star Gregory Peck set the darker, more mature tone for 1950s westerns with The Gunfighter (1950). According to legend, the film failed at the box office, and 20th Century-Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck blamed the failure on Peck's insistence on wearing a moustache. Peck made no such error when he and King teamed up again eight years later for this widescreen revenge story. By 1958 the concept of the "adult western" was widely enough understood that Fox could promote The Bravados as such a film. For the studio's purposes, however, the term probably didn't denote the moral ambiguities and "psychological" tone the genre had developed so much as the fact that King's movie dealt with rape.

Peck first appears as a stranger riding towards a town where he's heard there'll be a hanging. A deputy is under instructions to allow no one into town but Mr. Sims, the hangman, but he decides to escort a disarmed Peck in so the sheriff can question him. That official finds Peck's interest in the hanging a bit ghoulish, -- he claims not to know the four condemned men -- but agrees to let him stay. In these early scenes Peck is almost menacingly taciturn and icily indifferent to what others think of him.

Beer is fine for socializing before a hanging, but both Gregory Peck and Joan Collins may want stronger stuff later in the picture.

Most people in town mistake Peck for the hangman and open up about the crimes for which the foursome will die; they robbed a bank and killed men doing it. One person knows him, however; Josefa Velarde (Joan Collins), a rancher's daughter who hasn't seen the man she knows as Jim Douglass in some time. For now, Douglass is more interested in meeting the four doomed criminals, the "bravados." The sheriff allows him to take a look, a privilege he'll only grant otherwise to the chubby, avuncular Sims, who's finally arrived in town. Peck gives the quartet a good looking over, but none of them seem to recognize him, and after he leaves, they wonder among themselves who he is and what he's about.

Ladies and gentlemen, The Bravados: Stephen Boyd and Albert Salmi on top, Lee Van Cleef and Henry Silva below.

But the bravados have more important business: breaking out. The profoundly unthreatening hangman is not Mr. Sims but their man ("Curly Joe" DeRita!), waiting for the right moment to stab the sheriff in the back. It comes while Douglass, Josefa and most of the town are attending Mass. In this sequence old-timer Henry King beats Francis Ford Coppola to the punch by 14 years in crosscutting between a religious service, complete with eerie sacred music, and sinister doings elsewhere. He also milks maximum suspense out of the bravados' desperate effort to reach the jail key that fell out of the sheriff's pocket. "Sims" was supposed to use it to unlock their cell, but the sheriff managed to shoot him down before succumbing. The four men reach for it with their arms, legs, a ladle and a blanket, missing several times.

They're still struggling for it when we cut back to the church and the early departure of a shopkeeper's daughter (Kathleen Gallant). She goes to Dad's store, only to get jumped by the head bravado (Stephen Boyd), the gang having made good on their breakout offscreen. Now they have a hostage and human shield, as well as a head start on any pursuers. A posse forms quickly, but Douglass won't join them until morning, assuming that they'll have little chance of gaining ground on the gang at night.

By the time he catches up with the posse they've been pinned down by sniper fire by Bravado No. 2 (Albert Salmi), who departs amid their confusion to rejoin his pals. The gang quickly makes out that they man they know only as "the hunter," the stranger who visited them in jail, is their main pursuer. Boyd delegates the weakest link of the foursome (Lee Van Cleef) to ambush the hunter. Being the weakest link, he is himself ambushed by the stealthy Douglass. He's less interested in finding the other three bravados than in showing Van Cleef a pocket watch. It has a photo of a woman and child inside. It doesn't play a tune, but the scene, including Van Cleef's presence, has to have influenced Sergio Leone a little in the making of For a Few Dollars More. In any event, Douglass wants to know if Van Cleef recognizes the woman. He doesn't, he says, but Douglass won't believe him. It becomes clear that Douglass believes that the bravados raped and murdered this woman -- his wife. That's why he wanted to see them die, and why he's out to make them die now....

Peck's Jim Douglass is the archetypal obsessive antihero of Fifties westerns. His motives are selfish and self-righteous at the same time, and the interest of society in seeing the bravados captured and punished are a secondary consideration at best. Douglass has been letting his grievance stew for an unhealthy period of time. That comes out during his interrogation of Van Cleef, as he regales the terrified man with his imagined version of his wife's pleas for mercy. It's like a man picking at a scab in order to see his own blood and feel familiar pain, and it has gruesome consequences for the men he catches. A lot is left of necessity to our imagination, probably due to Production Code requirements, but we seem to be meant to assume that Douglass tortures two of the bravados to death during his quest. I'm going to spoil the ending in the next paragraph, so some of you may want to skip it.

Fifties audiences may have decided that Stephen Boyd's character deserved death for raping women, but is his death just as deserved if he dies for the wrong reasons?...

In a lot of the Fifties Westerns the antihero relearns civilized values in time to back off from committing any real atrocity. The Bravados is one of the exceptional films that doesn't grant its protagonist that luxury, since he doesn't realize the error of his actions until after he's already done them. Douglass has reduced the foursome to a lone survivor (Henry Silva, portrayed as the brains if not the leader of the group) whom he tracks across the Mexican border. He follows Silva to his home, where his wife is tending a sick child. Douglass invades the home to ambush Silva, only to get KO'd with a ceramic pot by Mrs. Bravado. When he wakes, Silva wants to know what it's all been about. Douglass brings out the watch again and, like all the others, Silva denies knowing the woman. Before crossing the border, Silva and Boyd had killed an old miner who lived near Douglass's ranch, and Silva had pocketed a sack of gold the miner had tried to run off with. Douglass now recognizes the sack as his property, lost the day his wife died. As Silva explains how he got it (which we know to be the truth), and as Douglass explains that the miner had tipped him off in the first place to the four men who had passed through the territory that day, Douglass realizes at last that the miner had fingered the bravados in order to throw the trail off himself. The miner had murdered Mrs. Douglass and taken her gold. The realization devastates Douglass, as well it might. We've seen plainly that the bravados are not nice guys. Boyd, in particular, is a rapist, and when Josefa learns of his latest rape she hysterically urges Douglass to wipe out the gang. But if you go after men, and kill some of them, for something they didn't do rather than what they have done, you may as well have killed innocent men. That's the message of this screenplay by the ubiqitous Philip Yordan, at least, and the most it can offer Douglass at the end is the consolation of the Church and the promise of Josefa's healing love.


King gives The Bravados all the sweep you'd want in a widescreen western. The film looks like it was shot entirely on locations, and that seems to have compelled King to do a lot of day-for-night shooting. It almost works when the old hand uses filters to recreate the tinting effects he'd have used in silent days, but the effect is ruined whenever the camera catches bright white clouds in the sky. Peck gives a strong performance, minimalist at first to keep us wondering about Douglass, then more intense as his catharsis is repeatedly denied. The bravados are a fine ensemble and work well together. Especially good is a scene between Boyd and Salmi in which they commit to stick together after they lose the posse. Boyd explains that his one weakness is women, and Salmi admits that his is cards. We finally realize that this has been an elaborate exercise in outlaw etiquette enabling Salmi to gracefully leave Boyd alone with their female hostage. It's a classical male-bonding scene with a chilling effect at the end. While King can't invest the film with all the outdoor expressionism of Anthony Mann or the lean rigor of Budd Boetticher, The Bravados shares much of the mood of their movies and deserves inclusion among the better westerns from the decade when Americans did them best.