Quando os Homens são Maus

(1966) The Meanest Men In The West WESTERN

Plays and feels like a really bad made for TV movie, but it's like the only movie where we can see Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin sharing the same screen together. The set up regards a robbery lead by Harge Talbot Jr (Charles Bronson) and company gone wrong since someone ratted him out. The movie centers on Harge trying to find the culprit responsible which is really his psychopathic brother Kalig (Lee Marvin) who had just kidnapped the judge(Lee J Cobb) who imprisoned him. This also happens to be Lee J Cobbs final film appearance. This movie is quite bad even for fans for both Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson fans.

Granted, I had not heard about this 1974 movie titled "The Meanest Men in the West" prior to stumbling upon it here in 2025. I didn't actually know that it was not a movie as per se, but it was actually two random episodes from "The Virginian" TV series, which I never even heard about. While Western is not a genre I generally veer towards, I do dabble every now and again when given a chance.

Writers Samuel Fuller and Ed Waters put together an okay script and storyline, though I suppose that if you have watched "The Virginian", and thus also watched these two episodes, the story would make more sense. Regardless, it proved watchable enough to sit through.

There were some familiar faces on the cast list, with the likes of Charles Grodin, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Lee J. Cobb, Ross Hagen, Bonnie Bartlett and Lance Kerwin. The acting performances were fair.

The editing was pretty lousy. Some of the scenes were brutally cut without consideration of the music, making for some very odd changes in sound and music.

My rating of "The Meanest Men in the West" lands on a generous four out of ten stars.

A Sam Fuller-directed and scripted episode of the TV show The Virginian starring Lee Marvin and Lee J. Cobb is cobbled together with another episode (I assume) starring Charles Bronson to create this dreadful mess. Bizarre voice-overs, misplaced shots, and freeze-frames attempt to create the new plot. Utterly ludicrous and a disservice to a great filmmaker.

Dull western is actually two episodes of "The Virginian" from the 1960s, one starring Charles Bronson and the other starring Lee Marvin, edited together and released theatrically almost 20 years later. The episodes are connected in that Marvin and Bronson are supposed to be half brothers, although they didn't appear together in their respective episode and their stories not originally connected. The only reason I wanted to see this film is that one of the two episodes was written and directed by the great Samuel Fuller ("The Big Red One," "The Steel Helmet," "Shock Corridor," etc.), but you'd barely notice when watching this routine TV western. There are flashes where you can see seeds of something better, such some basic story concepts (Fuller wrote and directed the Lee Marvin episode), Fuller's usual knack for action, and, of course, Bronson and Marvin. However, it's all undone by cheap television production values, such as cheap sets, bad photography, and painful overuse of stock footage. Marvin is good, but he seems to just be going through the motions, as does Fuller. Really, there's nothing to recommend here unless you're a Fuller, Marvin, or Bronson completionist.

This film has many troubles including a bad timeline. The first season portions guest starring Lee Marvin are set in 1898. At one point he sings the Lizzie Bordon song, referring to a woman who murdered her parents in 1892. Yet in the sixth season segments featuring his brother, Charles Bronson, he writes the year 1887 in the family bible as the year of his just born son. Elizabeth Grainger (Sara Lane) is kidnapped and referred to as Judge Garth's (Lee J. Cobb's) daughter, when in reality she was John Grainger's granddaughter and Clay Grainger's niece, and no relation to, nor never met the judge. MCA obviously was trying to capitalize on the popularity of the film The Dirty Dozen, starring Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson.