i must have seen a different film!!

An Exercise In Nonsense

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This offbeat 1959 western stars the laconic Robert Mitchum as gunslinger Martin Brady, a Texas outlaw and outcast who fled to his adopted country Mexico as a youth. He works for the corrupt Castro brothers of whom he finds out much too late that he's just a pawn they move about their chessboard (Northern Mexico) as they please.The film's major flaw is the narrative...it's a bit jumpy in spots but may have fallen victim studio intervention. Some characters seem to enter briefly, to be seen no more or are underdeveloped. Julie London's Helen Colton seems to fall victim to that. She's an ex dance hall girl (I believe), now a 'respected' wife of Major Colton (Gary Merrill) who engages in an affair with Brady out of pure lust.But Brady...who's growing older and wearier it seems before our eyes, sees her as his redemption. His guns have cost him heavily, he has no family or lover or even respect. All he has is Mexico and that has betrayed him too. If you're expecting an action packed, shoot them up...this is not for you.There are elements here we see in later films...we get a taste of Mexican culture, which Brady identifies more with than America, that we see in The Magnificent Seven and The Wild Bunch. And Paul Newman's John Russell in Hombre, mirrors Brady here. All are men without countries, men who cling to a culture or code American society shuns.The locations, photography and music (Alex North) all help create an atmosphere of majestic isolation. And the inclusion of black Buffalo soldiers is all too rare in westerns, even today. As one reviewer stated earlier, it could have been more. But there's still a lot here.

This is a film for those who wish to understand the Mitchum mystique. I first saw this film with my father when Bill Kennedy was still on Channel Nine in Canada. It has something for everyone; even the dignified and yet realistic presence of Leroy 'Satchel Page' as Buffalo Soldier Tobe Sutton. It's about a tough guy who finds himself vulnerable at all the wrong times and reluctantly must depend on the care of others when he least expects it.Some men, like Clint Eastwood of the Mount Rushmore School and more famously, Marlon Brando, are great at understatement and know how to make it work for them. Mitchum, with his sleepy-eyed 'I'm just here to get my paycheck' attitude is at the top of this heap. He does his job, no more or less, but that is what makes him such a great working-class hero. Mitchum does his job, and every once in awhile, like Bettie Page or Ernest Hemingway, he will flash you a little something extra. No charge. It's on the house.I first saw this film in black and white and later in color. I was surprised to find my appreciation of it has grown over the years and it does not seem a bit dated. It's a simple story, really, with about the complexity of a good short story. The intriguing thing is I cannot tell you why exactly it has stuck in my mind with such fondness. That in itself suggests a touch of great artistry.Alex North conducts a rousing score that suggests the best of Mexican music. The cinematography by Floyd Crosby and Alex Phillips seems even more appealing in color than it was in black and white when I viewed it again with my cousin James Arthur. It's a man's movie with a bit less romance than Bogart's THE LEFT HAND OF GOD, but every time I see it the movie seems to be spot on in all the right places. There is nothing baroque about the presentation of events and the story never props itself up on anything bordering sensationalism. Like Mitchum's acting, it is what it is, take it or leave it.But I think you will take it in the end. This movie has one of the best resolutions I have ever seen in a Western. After the last gunfight, you KNOW this chaos and nonsense in violence has come to an end the way a baseball game concludes with a walk off home run and Mitchum giving a clinic on how to put a bullet through the impulse to break out into tears with classic manly disconnection as one of the great natural actors of our time. I have seen this ending several times over the years and like the ending to '2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY', cannot tell you exactly why it is so poignant to me. Besides the treat of seeing the Baseball legend Satchel Paige in a movie and Julie London being easy on the eyes, and a host of venerable Latinos being sympathetically cast in supporting roles or as villains with sneering machismo, there is Mitchum swaggering through with that 'I don't give a damn' disinterest finally giving a damn at the end without saying a word.

An understated and underseen little character-driven western, The Wonderful Country has a touching melancholy soul, but has a serious, nagging nagging problem with pacing that leaves it feeling undercooked.The film deals with a man, Martin Brady (Robert Mitchum), who is a native Texan, but long ago fled to Mexico after killing his father's murderer. There, he got in with a dangerous criminal gang led by the Castro brothers, and as the film starts, he is escorting an illegitimate shipment of gold and guns into the small Texas town of Puerto. There, his horse, Legrimas (Spanish for "tears") gets spooked by some tumbleweed and he ends up breaking his leg, not only losing his shipment but becoming stranded in Puerto, where he makes friends and enemies all around town: in the former, German apprentice "Chico" (Max Slaten) and the Major's wife (Julie London, who has a giant face). But when the angry drunk town doctor (Charles McGraw) ends up fatally wounding Chico and Martin has to kill him in self defense, he and Legrimas must flee again, adrift in the emptiness, without a home.Much of the film's glories hang on the mug of Robert Mitchum, and his performance is virtuoso. In addition to being saddled with a thick faux-Mexican accent (that always threatens to become a distraction but is kept in check), he gets a damaged character that almost wholly internalizes his emotions, and manages to make him understandable. The rest of the supporting cast is a combination of random 'name' actors and forgettable role players, with Pedro Armendariz and Satchel Paige (!) showing up unexpectedly, and Julie London and Gary Merrill giving clipped, underfed performances for likewise roles.That ends up being the biggest problem with the film: everything feels clipped, rushed, undercooked. In the opening third where he is forced to stay in town, he not only recovers from an apparently serious broken leg in about a dozen minutes of screen time, and when he begins some sort of vague "love affair" with Major Colton's wife, it ends up meaning almost nothing. The summation of their 'relationship' ends up being a couple scenes where she makes eyes at him, then he leaves, then they meet again later, and lay this insane guilt trip on each other and talk about all these bad things that they "did", and...unless I passed out and missed several scenes, talk and glare is all that they did.The film also gives short shrift to pretty much every character supporting Mitchum. Characters float in, do something, usually one single thing, maybe slightly pivotal, and that action sends Mitchum somewhere else, and then disappears. Even the main relationship they intend to develop (between Brady and his "horse named Tears") gets most of its traction from allusion and assumption that I had to infer myself than any direct action, physical or mental).The general idea, the subtext the film wants to put forth is the wandering sadness of its protagonist, the 'wonderful country' is meant somewhat sarcastically since, while it is undeniably beautiful, Martin has no home, no place of residence within that wonderful country, and he keeps getting ousted from every comfortable place. The problem is, while he goes back and forth between Mexico and the US several times, each sequence is so short and ends so suddenly that none of them end up having much impact, and had Robert Parrish given his film some time to breath and stretch its dramatic legs, it might have been as memorable and emotional as its tone wanted to be, but at a scant hour and thirty-eight minutes, the film's memory diminishes by the minute, fading from view like a passing highway sign.{Grade: 6/10 (C+) / #22 (of 33) of 1959}

I think this movie is one of the better movies I'v seen and I have seen a lot of movies in my life time. I really like some of the lines in the movie. Like close to the end of the movie. They Martin Brady and Helen Colton are sanding next to the wall of a old mission talking to each other about what they had done. Helen make's the remark that she is ashame of the feelings she has for Brady knowing that her husband is not in the ground yet. Brady replies by saying what we did may have been wrong but the feelings they have for each other are not. Helen replies to him. Is'n it a pity then that life is what we do and not what we feel. At the last part when Brady had to shoot his horse named Tears. That got to me as I had a small dog and I loved her much. I had to put her down, her name was Tears. Maybe I'm just a old corn ball from the pass. But some movies and the words in them get inside of me. I like that. They will always be apart of me and my life.