Very well executed

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Fantastic!

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Burt Lancaster is terrific in this well directed movie.Even with his pale blue eyes, he comes across as a believable character of the results a mixed relationship. Even though the storyline is typical of the era, wrong being righted against over powering odds, Lancaster pulls it off in believable fashion. The movie gets better and better as I age into an old man. With all the computer generated garbage being put in theaters today, it's good to be able to turn on the western channel and see some real acting again.

It always strikes me as odd when a well known and celebrated white actor is given a Mexican or Indian role in a Western. It seems like the man's celebrity overwhelms the characterization to a distracting degree. Other examples would be Paul Newman as "Hombre" (1967) and Chuck Connors as "Geronimo" (1962). I guess it was customary for the era, and for the most part the actors made it work, but the idea always jolts me just a little bit.There's another thing with Burt Lancaster here to go along with the above. When Bob Valdez (why not Roberto?) puts on his former Apache-hunting military garb, he looked like the exact spitting image of character actor John Dehner. If you don't know him or can't picture Dehner right off, the next time he shows up in a Western you're watching, you're going to go hey, that looks like Burt Lancaster from "Valdez is Coming"; I guarantee it.I guess you'd have to call this a revenge Western of sorts after Valdez is entrapped into shooting an innocent black man for a propertied, belligerent rancher. Speaking of resemblances, didn't Jon Cypher look a little like Warren Beatty portraying Frank Tanner? Tanner was one of these arrogant know-all types who refuses to share compensation for the pregnant widow of the man killed by Valdez. If you tally up the damage done for the sake of a hundred dollars, even by late 1800's standards, you'd have to say the C-note would have been a bargain at half the cost. Tanner's woman Gay Erin (Susan Clark) described him best - "Sometimes you're human. Sometimes." A unique element in the story that I hadn't seen before had to do with the 'crucifixion' of Valdez at the hands of Tanner's henchmen. The makeshift cross tied to his back carried just enough symbolism to suggest that Valdez would earn his redemption the hard way. Eleven dead men later and his mission would be complete.

God knows what made the Broadway actor/director Edwin Sherin shoot this modest revenge western which I enjoyed immensely as a boy, next to George Roy Hill's "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", Martin Ritt's "Hombre" and Sydney Pollack's "Jeremiah Johnson". All four have more things in common than solely the title heroes' sky-blue eyes ; I would like to mention only what impressed me most (and still does), i.e., the final shot belonging in the gallery of the most memorable ones in the history of western."Valdez Is Coming" is schematic and not very believable, but it has its strengths, too : for instance some fine laconic dialogue in the vein of "The Magnificent Seven", or mostly fine actors with Lancaster in the lead. (It may be a personal prejudice, but I always found the old circus artiste more convincing in roles like this one than in those in Visconti's frescoes.) I enjoyed especially Barton Heyman as charismatic El Segundo, despite the reservations of colleague R.J.Maxwell (which sound justified to me).Remarkable is the participation of the veteran Hungarian cinematographer Gábor Pogány ; his camera-work here is nothing like as spectacular as in, let's say, "Il Cristo proibito", yet there are moments when the viewer's eye rejoices, even given the mediocre non-anamorphic transfer of the MGM's PAL disc.

This movie is, for long, a very handbook of that special era that was the 70s, when the paradigmatic view of American society, and our entire society, was changing archetypal views to accommodate the old fashion to the news, unsolved, challenges and, over most, to construct an "ad hoc" stereotype...in this way we have the lonely hero, the man who is capable to go up over the own feet when the social constructed roles of humiliation touch his very moral core and, following his superior imperative, finish taken the gun and opening his way with bullets but, over most, with bravery...a pure old fashion way to see the world and what the man must to do in there, the way that America was constructed, by the way....But this man carry with him the guiltiness too, in this case, we don't know how much Apaches he killed but for sure enough to make Valdez take over his old shoulders the vindictive claim never expressed for a silent Indian woman. The old theme: a man, just one man, can carry on over his shoulders the right way and, against all reasonable preview, win, but his struggle always is fight against the shadowed background of his own sins. This pure, ontological view about the man and his constraints, in "Valdez is coming" is mixed with all that construct that arise in 70's....The new theme: racism (Indian, black, Mexicans), contemporary capitalism (the bad guy, a kind of landlord, have a lucrative weapons trade that is ruined for Valdez intervention), feminism (the woman killed his husband because he was a bad person, betray the bad guy because for him she is just an object, ride with Valdez like his equal), and social responsibility (the cause of Valdez is a social cause, the moral legitimation to kill all those people is because that is done in virtue of a superior value, the justice, make flesh in the submissive Indian woman or Mexican good worker). The very final statement, posed in the last 5 minutes of movie, very improbable from a rationale point of view, make sense from the metaphorical view: the three man, the three views of life embodied in the bad guy, El Segundo y Valdez, make clear that everyone take decisions, that decisions carry on effects, and the way that anyone faced that effects make the difference between men...at last, everyone is alone with his conscience and the claims that the other can make about his acts, and the society is just a kind of desolate landscape looking at us with a kind of indifferent acquittance...a very 70s statement, for sure.