Il meraviglioso paese

The Wonderful Country finds Robert Mitchum as a gunslinger, a pistolero working for the local Mexican governor Pedro Armendariz. He had to flee Texas years ago after a shooting and Armendariz gave him shelter and work.

Despite that Mitchum is sent across the border on a gun buying trip. Unfortunately he takes a bad fall from a horse and winds up with a broken leg. While on the mend in that bordertown and after, Mitchum finds himself in a series of situations that call him to question what he's been doing and just where he can call home.

One of those situations is Julie London, wife of army major Gary Merrill who's got a bit of a past herself. She throws quite a few complications in Mitchum's past.

The Wonderful Country is a nicely put together western shot on location in Durango. It was one of the first westerns to use that town in Mexico, a whole lot more in the sixties would follow.

Besides those already mentioned the performances to watch for in this film are those of Charles McGraw as the frontier doctor and that of Satchel Paige as the cavalry sergeant. A year later John Ford would come out with Sergeant Rutledge about a black cavalry sergeant and the men around him, but I do believe that baseball immortal Satchel Paige was the first in Hollywood to portray a black cavalry man in a major motion picture.

McGraw is something else. He's the doctor who tends to Mitchum's broken leg and befriends him, but then gets one big pang of jealousy about Julie London that leads to tragedy. In real life McGraw was as much the hellraiser as he is in the film.

The Wonderful Country had the good fortune to be partially scripted by Tom Lea so his vision of the characters in his own novel remained pretty much intact. This was the only one of two novels by that writer/artist to be filmed.

That's as good a reason as any to see a very fine western.

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.

Mitchum is an assassin in the employ of Mexican mafia/government, and London is the wife of an American major. He becomes involved in Mexican civil disputes and decides to extricate himself too late.

The script brings the characters to life and reveals themes of self-loathing battling the ego in an extraordinary but low-key manner. The character performances are all convincing with the exception of a slight case of oversincerity on London's part. Gorgeous location filming in the deserts and in a Mexican town shot from a hilltop. The action scenes are pretty routine, but they and pretty much everything else is handled in a fairly realistic style, which adds greatly to the film's appeal.

I'd seen some good things about this one, but I was largely disappointed in "The Wonderful Country." First off, I applaud Robert Mitchum for stretching here: he plays a white Missourian raised in Mexico, his accent and even his posture a departure for Mitchum. The problem is, it just doesn't work. (That accent sure comes and goes!) The bigger problem is an unfocused (and rather hard to follow) screenplay that has Mitchum's Martin Brady running guns into Texas for the Mexican Castro family, recuperating there after a fall from his horse, then, after he kills a man, escaping back over the Rio Grande into Mexico. There's a spark with a married woman (Julie London's dissatisfied army wife, Helen Colton), meetings with rival Castro brothers... and, well, some more stuff which doesn't add up to quite enough in the end. Whether due to the accents and/or the sound recording, I found a significant amount of the dialogue simply hard to understand, and the story difficult to follow. But it also felt more than a little unfocused and rather dramatically inert, so that I found myself bored, which is one of the worst things I might say about a movie. Overall, maybe still worth a look for fans of classic Westerns, but mostly as a curiosity--an ambitious, if not exactly interesting, failure. (The Movie Czar 8/19/19)

I give this movie an E for effort - Mitchum plays an American who had escaped to Mexico in his youth after a violent episode and has grown up working for the local bandits controlling that part of the country. When sent to a US border town to negotiate a weapons deal, he breaks his leg and spends enough time in he US to realize he could make a life for himself with a brighter future - of course things go wrong. Based on a novel by Tom Lea, a forgotten writer of westerns, and staring along with Robert Mitchum in the romantic triangle is Gary Merrill as the local cavalry boss and Julie London as his unhappy wife. What makes it all interesting is the fact that the movie never quite "jells"- Mitchum tries his best against a cast of grade B actors and his performance mostly works. The worst performance is from Julie London who not only is dressed incongruously but looks and acts like a robot. The scenery is spectacular and is the winner in this movie. Add the use of over the top music, and this movie presages the Spaghetti Western.