The Texican (1966)

This movie wants to be a movie if and when it can. You have two named stars who could pull it off but fail to do so and the Director needs directing himself too. I kept thinking of a Clint Eastwood movie spaghetti film while watching this and I saw how this movie tried that format but couldn't quite get a toe hold. This movie comes across like slow-motion i.e. you want something to happen before it happens because you know it should but the movie moves at its own pace. Thus the viewer and the film never connect. I watch Audie and Broderick two veterans of the film world go through tired motions and got the feeling that their paychecks where holding them up. Even the horses, woman and whiskey (apple juice) in this movie looked tired and depressed. Bottom line? This movie should not even be shown but the lure of the two movie stars allows it to live on. I like to eat during films but this makes you slow down to the point where eating is the movie and this is a distraction. Too bad. This reminds me of the cliché "if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all". The strangest thing worth sharing is as follows. I have a movie collection of DVD's for years and I was desperate for something to watch with nothing being on cable or Netflix that interested me and I discover this in my collection. I don't even know how it got there LOL

At forty two, Audie Murphy looked considerably younger in this revenge tale of an outlaw crossing the Mexican border back into Arizona to avenge the murder of his newspaper editor brother. Jess Carlin's (Murphy) criminal past is never elaborated on in the story, so you have to take it on faith that he was a wanted man, at least in the town of Rimrock where most of the action takes place. Rimrock is run by town boss Luke Starr (Broderick Crawford), behind the murder of Roy Carlin, and making life difficult for younger brother.There's a cool early scene in which Jess Carlin enters a saloon and one of the poker table chairs is empty. A man strumming a guitar sings a line of a song warning Jess not to sit in on the game, advice taken by the gunslinger. Right after that, Carlin guns down two bounty hunters, leaving the first one alive, a former friend who needed the bounty money for a sick wife. Murphy plays the scene with a conviction that he didn't need to kill his opponent once the dust settled, something you don't see very often in a Western.You know, there wouldn't have even been a story here if one of Starr's henchmen had been a better shot with his rifle. From a fairly good vantage point, the outlaw missed and Jess Carlin escaped the ambush attempt to make his way to Rimrock. Now here's what bothered me about the story. The bad guys were willing to take out Carlin early on, but once he was in town at close range, even face to face at times, none of the henchmen ever made a play. They could have ganged up on Carlin at any point leaving Luke Starr unscathed, just the way they did with whiskey salesman Boyd Thompson (Gereard Tichy). But then I guess, the hero wouldn't have made it to the end of the picture.A couple other observations - before he had to press the point with the Woodstock Hotel desk clerk, Jess was offered a room at three dollars a day with plenty of windows and a bed with springs. Can't you just see Best Western using that as a selling point in one of their ads today? And I really have to search my memory for what point in time it became OK to show a nude woman on screen in a theatrical film. Not a live actor, but that painting of a reclining woman with a breast exposed displayed over the bar of the Silver Ring Saloon seemed rather scandalous for a 1966 movie. They didn't show naked women at Woodstock until 1969.

and annoying sound track. this western simply sucks big time. the dialog, my, is one of the worst. audie's small mouth still bothered me a lot, his acting still not quite up to the level as lot of the other greater western actors in that era. the screenplay also is just so pretentious that sometimes i just felt it might not know how to continue. the annoying sound track didn't matching the scenes, just moronically played on and on. don't even know why this movie got to be shot in spain. those locally recruited actors were just bad as those non-talented b-movie guys today. but the worst of the worst i think was still the sound track and audie's lousy acting. there's nothing great or even worth talking about. so actually, i'm wasting my time here.

Times were getting hard for Audie Murphy in the '60s. He started getting financial problems, his personal life was going to hell, and the kind of westerns that had made him a star were starting to dry up. So he went to Spain to make this Spanish western. That fact did not bother me when I heard about this movie. Many of my favorite westerns are European westerns, so I was pretty intrigued to see what Europeans would do with a Hollywood star like Murphy.I was disappointed with this movie in the end, however. I will admit that the sets are fine, and there is some good desert scenery. But I found the story surprisingly slow and dull. Murphy's character knows who the culprit is that murdered his brother, but he does pretty much nothing about it until the very end of the movie. Until that happens, the audience is treated to endless (and boring) chat, a bland villain, and a pretty bland hero as well.The faults of this movie can probably be explained that while this was a European western, there was no Italian involvement. The Italians were the ones who really made European westerns shine, from the music to the scripts. Watch one of these kinds of European westerns instead of "The Texican", even if it doesn't contain a star as big as Murphy. You'll most likely be greater entertained.