How the West Was Won-Well The Part Down South Of The Border, Down Mexico Way, Anyway-Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper’s “Vera Cruz” (1954)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Renan Saint John 

Vera Cruz, starring Burt Lancaster, Gary Cooper and usual ensemble of cowpokes and Mexican nationals who populated Tex-Mex films south of border, the post-Mexican War, post Gadsden’s Purchase border if anybody is asking, directed by Robert Aldrich, 1954 

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Don’t ever get Lance Lawrence started on the Wild West, the American West of the 19^th century not today’s modern cowboy silliness gone awry where they rudely ride in Piper Clubs and swill their booze in exclusive country clubs where no braceros, you know Mexicans, or injuns, ah, Native American need apply, need to know anything but where the servant’s entrance is, down in Sun Belt land where the only vestiges of the by-gone days are tourista ghost towns and abandoned Hollywood locales. For one thing if you start up with Lance about any ancient West you will never get out of the barroom and not any exclusive country club watering hole by some publican’s pub, away from the water cooler or out of your “take him home to his house after he has had a few too many” car alive. And for that one very simply reason I am the one who has been assigned by site manager Greg Green to do this review of the 1950s Vera Cruz version of part of the Western saga since even infinitely patient Greg does not want to hear everything from the first trail west by Daniel Boone and others coming out of Appalachia when a man, and his womenfolk, could not breath in the shuffling Eastern seaboard cities until the last cowboy round-up about 1910 and maybe a smidgen later if you decide you want to add guys like Gay and his misfit brethren from Arthur Miller’s The Misfits to the list. I have heard Lance go either way on that possibility depending on who was buying the drinks. Smart man, that Greg, very smart.    

Of course, if you really wanted to know in depth the background to the plot of this film then Lance would be your man since this story does not take place directly in the Old West that we of a couple of generations back “learned” about through lying television and dime store novels which only made the publishers rich. So we are not talking about the previously unexplored parts out in the places where the states are square and you had better have been as well or you might find the town name of Tombstone a little too close for comfort me Rn the part stolen from Mexico in various land grab wars and skirmishes like Jimmy Polk’s folly that guys like Henry David Thoreau and young Congressman Abraham Lincoln got in a snit about and a so-called negotiation called the Gadsden Purchase. Information which should give one pause desperate Mexican immigrant are coming over the border to, well, to their homeland if you think about it.

This oater, a term cribbed from a crossword puzzle answer once, centers on the port of Vera Cruz and on the short not so sweet reign of one Maximillian who declared himself in as emperor of Mexico for no other reason that his boss, Napoleon III of France, a tin despot in his own right who a guy named Karl Marx, you might have heard of him if you are not too young skewered in a couple of pamphlets he wrote about France in the Napoleonic second-coming, the farce part not the tragedy coming. This throne grab happened, as a lot of things did when guys wanted stuff, wanted influence in the whole wide world back right during the American Civil when everybody was looking elsewhere. This new land grab by experienced European thug rulers was nothing new but did run afoul of the vaunted Monroe Doctrine that Jimmy M, he of the one-time Era of Good Feeling as the history books had it, before all hell broke loose over slavery, over white supremacy, which is still with us today, put together to keep the damn Europeans out of America’s sphere of influence, out of the Americas. Apparently from the historic record old Max, Max I if anybody insists since he was the first Max to hold the title, in Mexico anyway, didn’t have to be asked twice whether he wanted the keys to the kingdom.

Naturally there was a little problem, no, a big problem since Mexico, having shed the bastard fetid, nice word, right, rotting Spanish interlopers a few decades before had it own set of rulers, duly elected or not and if so maybe on to short a franchise, and so there was bound to be a showdown, an all out fight really one the national feeling got aroused and Benny Juarez took umbrage and built up an army of national liberation. With that background we are set to tell the tale here, the Old West tale inside the controversy going on south of the border.

After the death and destruction of the American Civil War a lot of ex-soldiers on either side were out of sorts, could not like happened in later wars, maybe all wars go back to whatever nine to five routine they had been doing before the war. Some guys in a later war, in the Vietnam War which a number of older writers at this publication had participated in or had known people who had fought the war, wound up in alternative universe encampments like the one Frank Jackman and Allan Jackson have described in these pages under the title Brothers Under The Bridges over the years. Some guys though got their blood up permanently and that is where the connection between later wars and that Civil War comes in. Some guys and lead character here Ben Tranes, an ex-rebel, played by Gary Cooper, turned mercenary. Would go where they could get serious pay for their services, their killing fields services. Others, civilians,  would show up who were “from hunger” having gotten tossed out of respectable society and wandered to whatever kept them in cash by any mean, not all legal. Were outlaws, bad guys in the terms used in pre-1960s Westerns dragged out from the Hollywood bushes. The king hell king here to use a term learned from old friend Bart Webber was nasty Joe Erin, a mercenary of no known character except shoot first and fast if you want something, played by ruggedly handsome Burt Lancaster.    

All these forces come together in one place for one purpose-to get rich off the poor Mexican braceros’ hard scrabble gold. Three million in 1860s money and many times more by today’s standards so nothing to sneeze at. This is the way things played as everybody lusted after gold, after what ace private detective Sam Spade would later under different circumstances call “the stuff that dreams are made of,”  or with many twists and turns played out. Which in the end would make old Max I nothing but a subject for one of the French painter Manet’s (not Monet okay) mural-sized paintings about his sad ass end before a Mexican firing squad who would give no quarter (a copy of which is on display at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts if I recall). So nothing but the subject of an execution Mexican-style. Neither Ben nor Joe, nor their confederates and for the moment allies could give a fuck about who paid them, Benny or Max, but everything pointed to them shilling for Max. For cash.

The gag at first was to escort some French countess with greedy eyes and a taste for intrigue to port of call Vera Cruz so she could go back to Paris and buy dresses or something. Don’t believe that for a minute for she might have been nobility, but she had the hard-heart of a tramp. Had turned more than one man’s head the wrong way with that exotic perfume and that sweet smell of bath soap to guys who had been out on the trail too long. Had been playing footsie at first with Max’s right hand military man who had plans of his own which may have, or may not have, included her but definitely didn’t once he found out she had the morals of some cheap whore who could use any man to further her schemes.

This countess was a piece of work though playing Ben and Joe off each other for a while and dangling that marquis if that is what he was, that was his title, who knows half of Europe claimed some link to nobility or royalty, at the same time. Meanwhile Ben and Joe were planning their own respective parties, plans which excluded the other-excluded too that countess once Joe got his dander up when he sensed she was playing him as the strong silent type who could get her what she wanted and where she wanted to go. Old Ben, having been an honorable fighting for a cause kind of guy begins to crumble when he takes up with a fetching senorita who also happens to be a partisan of the Juaritas, the Benny’s boys, Mexican national who want their government back and their dough staying in Mexico.

That was the wild card all along which Joe never figured and which Ben saw was the only right thing to do. In the end one or the other after a million small skirmishes between them and between them and the Juarez forces had to go down. And it wasn’t High Noon good guy survivor Gary Cooper who was stretched out in some dirty back street facing a pauper’s grave. Joe, a real psycho who killed just to see a man die like that guy Johnny Cash sang about, bought the slug and good riddance. In the end the whole French caper, the whole Max deal was a joke, except to Max who like I said got nothing but a strong Academy-approved  painting of his demise for his efforts. See Lance Lawrence could never have told the tale this way-he would just be starting to warm up to the subject of Max I and the treacherous dandies of Europe at this point.