The Wonderful Country (1959)

Getting near the end of the TV shows/films I had gathered up to view from Christmas,I decided to check what titles had been added to Netflix UK. Enjoying the breezy Western Rachel and the Stranger a few months ago,I was pleased to find a Western starring "Big Bob" Mitchum had been added to the site,which led to getting set to find out how wonderful this country could be.The plot:After killing the murderer who killed his dad, Martin Brady has been living in exile in Mexico. Crossing paths with the Castro brothers,Brady is hired to go undercover and get weapons in the US. Traveling undercover,Brady is stopped in his tracks by a broken leg. Treated by the weapons sellers,Brady is introduced to Major Colton,who wants to set a deal that will cross boarders that will have the Castro brothers on the same front. View on the film:Looking surprisingly fresh faced, Mitchum gives a charming performance as Brady,whose exiled state allows Mitchum to give Brady rugged heroics, which is lassoed with a troubling sense of doubt over Brady ever getting the chance to return to the wonderful country. Riding into the sunset with Mitchum, Gary Merrill gives a great performance as Colton,who is given by Merrill a striking feeling of being unable to find light in the dark clouds above.Traveling the country from Tom Lea's (who has a cameo) novel,the screenplay by Robert Ardrey & Walter Bernstein leaves the barroom fights to draw a thoughtful Folk tale Western. Running from the US after getting revenge for the killing of his dad,the writers do very well at making each of the separate groups Brady becomes entangled in ones that drive his desire to walk back into the country of his family. Gathering the bullets for Brady,director Robert Parrish gives Brady's exiled state an elegant sun dried appearance,burning with dry reds hit by Apaches,as Brady tries to get back to the wonderful country.

This is a decent if not great Western the ploughs the familiar western fields of redemption. Robert Mitchum is Martin Brady an American who has grown up in Mexico but whom is now back. We witness Brady getting used to his new surroundings and the unexpected knowledge that comes with them, yet we also see him come to terms with the fact that the Americans are just as scheming as the Mexicans they think themselves superior to. Mitchum does reasonably well in this part though he does have a rather strange accent. He gives a good account of a brooding man coming to terms with him self and the political machinery of life. Unfortunately the supporting cast do not fare so well but some of this may well be to do with the sparse two dimensional characters. Again the story or the script does nothing to particularly lift this movie but they are not terrible either. So at the end of the day would I watch this movie again? Probably not unless there really was no alternative viewing. If you're a fan of the western give the movie an additional star.

The two main interests of this passable western: Mitchum is very cool (and almost blonde!), while his female pair is attractive and nice. Mitchum has a large and quite compact role, picturesque, and not a badly written one. He looked unusually ,unexpectedly well as gunman and smuggler that trades guns and silver for the Mexicans.The plot is in itself quite interesting. The Wonderful Country (1959) is a drama, an action drama set in a western dimension. The director obviously didn't find the fittest approach; while the film's name tells nothing about its content, though it's probably meant to be acidly ironic and disillusioned. For once at the westerns, I was interested in seeing a love story; but not much happens this way. The movie looks like an interesting exercise—like something much better could of been made with this content. But then again, most westerns may give this impression. The directing is, as I said, _uninventive, yet competent on its level. I mean, it keeps the film from looking ridiculous, involuntarily funny or something.Mitchum's part is certainly very likable, very well performed, and eminently enjoyable. It's almost like a study of Mitchum's aptitudes.A certain very virile and mysterious (i.e., rich in intuitive content and cognition) aspect of Mitchum's role reminded me of the Rourke of the '80s. In this western, Mitchum is as interesting, in the same way I mean, as was Rourke in the '80s.What the film needed were action and a pace.But, notwithstanding, interesting western.

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.