El hombre de Río Malo

But for the horrible completely out of place soundtrack. Just ruins the mood and feel for an otherwise decent movie with the great LVC! Worst. Soundtrack. Ever.

Lovable rogue Lee Van Cleef steals from banks and blows things up for a living. He and his gang are hired by James Mason to explode an Army munitions stockpile in Mexico, using a luxury riverboat as a base of operations, only to be pulled into a bigger scheme that digs them even deeper into the revolution.

Like most of the Mexican Revolution spaghetti westerns (A Bullet For The General being one exception), this is an acquired taste. Production values are a little iffy and it does run out of steam a bit near the end. On the whole though, there's certainly a lot of action and adventure to make up for it's shortcomings.

A Spanish-made, but American-produced minor addition to the genre, this benefits from the participation of Hollywood veterans Philip Yordan and Bernard Gordon, as well as Van Cleef, Mason, and a few familiar European favorites like Aldo Sambrell, Eduardo Fajardo, Gianni Garko, Diana Lorys, and the beautiful Gina Lollabrigida.

An oddball soundtrack goes from really dated vocal-quartets, to early-seventies style hard rock, with a marching band in-between!

Recommended mainly for Van Cleef fanatics.

American Lee Van Cleef and Englishman James Mason join Gina Lollobrigida and a number of unfamiliar European players for this spaghetti western about the Mexican Revolution of the teen years. For James Mason this marked his first appearance in a horse opera albeit not a genuine American one.

For the most part I'm a firm believer that the only real westerns are done in the western hemisphere and Bad Man's River won't convince any of you I'm wrong. It's a comic western, but western icon Lee Van Cleef just does not have a comic bone in his body. As for Gina Lollobrigida she pairs off far better with Rock Hudson and I'm sure she wished she was making another comedy with him.

Mason is a revolutionary and Gina his wife. She's also the former wife of outlaw Lee Van Cleef and they find it might be to their mutual advantage to pull off a caper. Easier said than done however and Gina has quite the surprise in the end.

According to the Citadel Film series book on the films of James Mason he didn't think much of Bad Man's River and I agree.

This eccentric Euro-Western has more in common with the revisionist, light-hearted approach of BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) than with any of the sadistic Italian fare shot around the same time and on the same locations. A great, eclectic cast (Lee Van Cleef, James Mason, Gina Lollobrigida, Sergio Fantoni, Jess Hahn, Simon Andreu, Eduardo Fajardo, Gianni Garko, Diana Lorys) finds itself somewhat stranded - and in the case of Mason, evidently embarrassed - in the face of the film's bizarre changes of mood, some of which work (there are a few enjoyably comical action sequences) and some of which don't (why the director chose to overdose on the "freeze-frame" stuff at the beginning is anyone's guess); in light of all this, the involvement of talented Hollywood veterans Philip Yordan, Irving Lerner and Bernard Gordon is even more baffling. All in all, however, BAD MAN'S RIVER emerges as a surprisingly pleasant, if ultimately forgettable, diversion.

I have seen this film in a double feature together with SABATA and it fell clearly short in comparison with the latter. The cast is good(Van Cleef, James Mason, Eduardo Fajardo and Gina Lollobrigida) and the "sets"(e.g. a riverboat) are somewhat original. But the score is mostly annoying and the story was unable to really involve me(Don't ask me intensely about the plot!). The Comedy is often fast paced and sometimes mildly funny.

For people who like the country/pop/rock score, however, things might look certainly different.

3 / 10.