Review of The Professionals (1966) by Paul D — 30 May 2008

I have seen this movie floating around stores for some time now, and until recently categorized it as "western" and then ignored it. Yes, friends, I, too, was one of those people who said "Eugh, westerns? No thanks!" with nary a gander at their actual qualities or failings. I used to find the endless brown and earthtone colour palettes boring--plus an awful lot of them were slowly paced, and they certainly had neither aliens nor monsters, which meant that in my early days they were categorically boring. The colour palette was the last thing for me to get over--beyond the added minor hump of the idiot generalizations that they are all gung-ho, machismo bad writing and insipid plots.

But once I noticed this one had Lee Marvin and I knew who that was, well, it became a lot more interesting. The inclusion of a black man (Woody Strode) and Burt Lancaster (even if I'd only seen him in The Rainmaker--if even that, as I can't be sure I did see it, and not just clips) sort of sealed the deal.

Ralph Bellamy (Joe Grant) hires a team of aging experts--the titular professionals--to rescue his wife Maria (Claudia Cardinale who is, oh, hey, from my favourite western ever--Once Upon a Time in the West!) from the clutches of Mexican bandit Jesus Raza (Jack Palance...yes, as a Mexican bandit). Each one of them is an expert in a particular field related to the rescue of a hostage from a group of armed professionals: Henry "Rico" Fardan (Marvin) is a seasoned leader who once worked alongside Raza in the Mexican revolution, Hans Ehrengard (Robert Ryan) is a horseman, Jake Sharp (Strode) is a tracker and marksman with the silent bow-and-arrow, and at Fardan's encouragement, the fourth, Bill Dolworth (Lancaster) is hired as expert in explosives. They re-evaluate the plan to track down Raza and reclaim Grant's wife and re-plan the whole thing themselves to acknowledge the dangers they know as professionals and as people experienced with Raza and his gang. The curious element that intrudes is the familiarity Fardan and Dolworth have with Raza--they question how this man they worked alongside could be turned to a simple kidnapper from the man they once knew. But even with these questions, they do not hesitate to perform the job they were hired to do. But their morality does not fail them, and they will not completely follow orders into hell without a thought.

This is yet another in the string of westerns about badass gunslingers past their time in the world, (see also: The Wild Bunch, The Magnificent Seven, Ride the High Country...) which tend to be my favourite variety of westerns, a bit of good old-fashioned cynicism about the encroaching industry and business-based world. While I tend to run in circles that would be more annoyed by the show of machismo and moral simplicity (of a kind), as well as the tendency toward violent solutions and possibly perceived misogyny (I tend to take such things stride in some ways when it comes to film--most of them come from a period when this was the dynamic, whether one likes it or not, though I have no interest in the actual practice) or at least sexism, I find this kind of dying breed of John Wayne character fascinating and admirable for what it is--and I do mean the John Wayne of actual film appearances, not the idiotically simplified version of him as simple, brute of a man, but the one that has some flaws within that general archetype. Marvin and Lancaster are perfect for these roles, managing to more perfectly feel like aging professionals in the field of warefare than the more bold, starring variety seen in people like Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen (both of whom I like, mind you) in The Magnificent Seven. It's a pair that, even if they did not do westerns prior (of course they did) they would have the look of rough men, despite Lancaster's earlier reputation as "hunk," and so we can see more in their faces to suggest this tired past and this loss of place in the world.

Richard Brooks does an admirable job of getting our boys through this journey--it is a fabulous script, with some real great zingers of wit thrown around, mostly by Marvin and Lancaster, in a way that they manage to make look effortless and off-the-cuff, and with a nice pacing and movement that keeps us moving from plan to execution to changes to denouement.

Not a film that breaks my appreciation for almost all (if not all) of the westerns I've seen, and one that makes me even more wish to encourage those who shared my prior bias to look beyond it and give films like this a shot. Fun and smart, like you just don't seem to see anymore, with that wonderful sense that these are the characters, not actors or faces, and that those lines were not specifically set up and designed to catch the audience but were just what they would say at that time.