Searing Western with a very tough Gregory Peck

I wouldn't go quite as far as Bob Dylan (in "Brownsville Girl") that I'd see Gregory Peck in anything (I draw the line at "David and Bathsheba"), but I'd watch most any Gregory Peck film I haven't seen and many that I have. Being a big fan of the 1950 film "The Gunfighter"--the movie Dylan recalls without remembering its name in the song--I was very willing to give "The Bravados," the 1958 western, also directed by Henry King, a try.

Except for Joan Collins's abject failure as a Latina heiress and some of the overly pumped-up musical score, "The Bravados" is a great film, one of the great adult westerns of the 1950s, in the company of Anthony Mann's westerns with James Stewart and John Ford's "The Searchers," which is now recognized as a canonical masterpiece. Peck in "The Bravados" has the same relentless monomania John Wayne had in "The Searchers" (and that Peck himself had in John Huston's film of "Moby Dick").

Jim Douglass (Peck) arrives in Rio Arriba at the start of the film to watch the hanging of four men he has been stalking for six months, since his wife was raped and murdered. He is practically mute, with a barely contained rage blazing in his eyes. When the Sheriff Sanchez (Herbert Rudley) lets him look at the prisoners in their cell, he emits no sound. The "Indian" Lujan (Henry Silva) recognizes the eyes of a hunter. None of the four condemned men know Douglass or who he is. (Over the course of the movie, they find out.)

They are sprung by Joe DeRita ("Curly Joe" of the 3 Stooges!) as the hangman and the hunt resumes, with Douglass the de facto leader of a posse, but picking off the escaped prisoners in direct encounters, confronting them with the picture of his dead wife and young daughter that he carries inside his pocket watch. The ones I recognize are Lee Van Cleef, Stephen Boyd, and Henry Silva. (I think the other is Albert Salmi.) For me, Silva is indelibly one of the villains from "The Manchurian Candidate," but his role here turns out to have surprising depths. He does more than lock eyes with Peck in the jailhouse scene.

The movie has a denouement (before the ending) that rivals those in "The Gunfighter" and "The Searchers" for poetic justice (of the mouthful of ashes flavor). The movie is also very scenic (filmed by four-time Oscar winner Leon Shamroy) and contains the carefully wrought details of escape and the hunt of the best action flicks. What really matters most, however, is all in Gregory Peck's eyes (and not just the burning quest for vengeance).

Henry King made a range of movies. Indeed, he made a range of movies just with Gregory Peck, including some of Peck's best (Twelve o'clock High, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Gunfighter) although he also directed Peck in the questionable soap opera "Beloved Infidel " and "David and Bathsheba" (which I may yet have to check out!)