Burt Reynolds Archives - Great Western Movies

100 Rifles—Jim Brown, Raquel Welch, Burt Reynolds, Fernando Lamas, Dan O’Herlihy, Aldo Sambrell (1969; Dir: Tom Gries)

This is sometimes referred to as a spaghetti western, but it isn’t. Although it was filmed in Spain like many spaghetti westerns and featured Italian actor Aldo Sambrell in the cast, it had an American director, writer, producer and most of the cast. In fact, there was a lot of American talent involved here. This was the second of director Tom Gries’ three westerns (along with Will Penny and Breakheart Pass). He also co-wrote the script, along with experienced screenwriter Claire Huffaker (The Comancheros, Rio Conchos). It has a very good musical score by Jerry Goldsmith. And it featured three stars who were either on the rise (Burt Reynolds, Jim Brown) or near their peaks (Raquel Welch, known more for her physical attributes than for acting ability, but she still had box office appeal). It gave Jim Brown, who had his start in movies with the western Rio Conchos five years earlier, a more substantial leading role than he had previously enjoyed in films. And it also gave U.S. audiences the first bi-racial love scene in a mainstream movie.

It looks to be set in northern Mexico (specifically, in the state of Sonora) in the early 20th century, the era of continuous Mexican revolution, with trains, a few cars and a few modern armaments scattered around. Gen. Verdugo (Fernando Lamas), the official governor of Sonora, leads regular troops against the Yaqui Indians and rebels under Gen. Romero. One of the Yaquis is Sarita (Raquel Welch), as in the opening scene we see Verdugo hang her father. Into town separately ride two Americans. One is Yaqui Joe Herrera (Burt Reynolds), only half Yaqui, who has just robbed a bank in Phoenix, Arizona, of $6,000. The other is Lyedecker (Jim Brown), a former buffalo soldier who has taken a temporary job as a peace officer and hopes to make it permanent by bringing in Joe. Verdugo is not minded to let any of the three go, but they escape together with Verdugo and his men in hot pursuit.

Yaqui Joe (Burt Reynolds) and Lyedecker (Jim Brown) make a break for it.

Joe has used the stolen money to buy the 100 rifles of the title for the desperate Yaquis. They recover the rifles on mules outside of town, fighting a rearguard action against Verdugo. Lyedecker develops a relationship (or at least a one-night stand) with Sarita. As they arrive in the town where they expect to turn the rifles over to Gen. Romero, they find that he has been killed the day before, and Lyedecker is hailed as the new general. He leads in the capture of an army train, although Verdugo wasn’t on it as they had hoped. Taking the train into Nogales, on the northern border of Mexico, for an attack on Verdugo’s forces there, Verdugo hears of their plan and is ready for the train. Lyedecker, Joe, Sarita and most of the Yaquis and rebels jump off before the train crashes into Nogales, and a battle ensues, with the Yaquis using captured weapons. Finally, Verdugo himself is clubbed to death with rifle butts, but Sarita is also killed. Lyedecker appoints Joe his successor as Yaqui/rebel general and heads back to the U.S.

Jim Brown would become a bigger star in the blaxploitation films and a few more westerns of the 1970s, developing (like Robert Mitchum) a sub-specialty in westerns featuring adventures in Mexico (this, Rio Conchos, Take a Hard Ride, etc.). He works well here, although Burt Reynolds does better. Raquel Welch does what’s required of her, with flaring nostrils to indicate a fiery temperament and putting her physique on display (a bit quaint by current cinematic standards). Welch is particularly effective in a scene that calls for her to distract a trainful of soldiers by taking a shower under a water tower. Pretty smoky for a mainstream 1969 movie, but she’s wearing a white shirt while doing it; nevertheless it works as intended. Reynolds and Welch did not get on well during the filming and would not work together again.

A couple of publicity stills will give an idea of how this movie was marketed. Burt Reynolds was said to have suggested as a tongue-in-cheek strategy, “Take her shirt off, take his shirt off, and give me all the lines.”

The Lyedecker-Sarita relationship was daring for its time, but it seems unremarkable now and it does slow down the plot of a movie obviously based on action. The film seems like it could be tightened up to good effect. Sarita’s death off-screen in the final battle scene feels arbitrary, although clearly such things happen in battles like the one in Nogales. The movie’s not terrible, or even really bad, but the film’s present interest is more as a cinematic and cultural artifact of 1969 rather than because it’s a good western. In color, at 110 minutes. It was rated R on its release, because of all the violence and the steamy scenes with Raquel Welch.

Somehow Jim Brown got lost on this Asian poster.

If you didn’t get enough Raquel Welch, see her in Bandolero! (adventuring in Mexico again, this time with James Stewart and Dean Martin) and in Hannie Caulder, a female revenge story. Burt Reynolds had already done the spaghetti western Navajo Joe, and would go on to appear in Sam Whiskey and The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing as he became a bigger star in the early 1970s.

Hard Ground—Burt Reynolds, Bruce Dern, Amy Jo Johnson, Seth Peterson (MfTV, 2003; Dir: Frank Q. Dobbs)

A variation on a frequently-used theme: two old-timers, a lawman and an outlaw, join forces to use their experience and old-time skills to deal with a gang of more modern (and nastier) bad guys. In this case, John “Chill” McKay (Burt Reynolds) is a former bounty hunter serving twenty years in the Arizona territorial prison in Yuma. He’s half-way through that term in 1901. He is released to the custody of his brother-in-law Nate Hutchinson (Bruce Dern) to track down psychotic bandit and prison escapee Billy Bucklin (David Figlioli), who has a new gang and is heading south toward the Mexican border to pull off some kind of nefarious job.

[McKay refuses to join Billy after his gang has killed the men guarding the wagon in which they were being transported to prison.]

Billy Bucklin: “What about you?”

John McKay: “I’ll see you in hell, Billy.”

Billy Bucklin: “Hell’s bound to be a better place than Yuma prison.”

The wrinkle is that Hutch’s deputy is McKay’s son Joshua (Seth Peterson); he’s tracking the bad guys out ahead of McKay and Hutch. He rescues Liz Kennedy (Amy Jo Johnson) from a couple of the gang and leaves her at a remote trading post, for Hutch and McKay to send her back. She won’t go back, predictably enough. So now she’s following along with Hutch and McKay; she doesn’t have their survival and violence skills, but she gets by on spunk. There’s an undercurrent of tension between McKay and his son. Will there be some sort of rapprochement between the two, and, if so, how? How many of them will survive the upcoming confrontation with Bucklin?

Brothers-in-law, former antagonists and now partners: Nate Hutchinson (Bruce Dern), lawman (for a change), and Chill McKay (Burt Reynolds), convict and bounty hunter.

Bucklin and gang hit a U.S. army gold shipment, slaughtering the soldiers escorting it. Undeterred by the border, Hutch, McKay, Joshua and Liz head into Mexico after Bucklin, and there is a climactic shootout in a Mexican town. It’s better than many of its made-for-television type, although Burt Reynolds’ facelift is distracting. He’s actually not bad in the role, though. The screenplay isn’t great. One wonders it the director’s name, Frank Q. Dobbs, is a pseudonym. He has apparently been involved in other television westerns and western minseries, mostly as a producer: Streets of Laredo, Dead Man’s Walk, Rio Diablo, Johnson County War.

Burt Reynolds had a promising career in westerns beginning in the mid-1960s, when he became part of the cast in the late portions of the long-running show Gunsmoke on television. He appeared as the protagonist in Navajo Joe (1966), a spaghetti western directed by Sergio Coliima. (Reynolds supposedly signed on thinking the director would be another Sergio–legendary Sergio Leone.) He did well enough in a couple of big budget westerns in the early 1970s: the comedy Sam Whiskey and the more serious and underrated The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, based on a best-selling novel of the time. He seemed like he might have had a robust career in westerns, especially those requiring a comedic touch but not too broad an edge–perhaps the sort of thing James Garner did well. But the genre was dying out for the next couple of decades, and he drifted into such high-box-office-but-low-prestige good-ol’-boy fare as the Smoky and the Bandit and Cannonball Run movies. He’s pretty good here, in the twilight of his career. He and fellow old pro Bruce Dern carry the film, although supporting players Amy Jo Johnson and Seth Peterson are fine in their roles, too..

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100 Rifles

Hard Ground