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The Wonderful Country (1959)

The Wonderful Country (1959)
July 24, 2011 - 7:00 pm
In-person: 
Alan K. Rode, film historian.

Directed by Robert Parrish

Actor Robert Mitchum executive produced and stars in this surprisingly unsung border Western about a gun running ex-pat American, Martin Brady, who’s buried himself so deep in Mexico on the run from his past that he’s picked up a Mexican accent. When his boss, a corrupt state governor played by Pedro Armendáriz, calls him a “gringo,” Brady winces from the shame. When a job north of the border goes south, Brady finds himself stranded, caught between two countries, two identities. As war and violence push him back and forth across the Rio Grande, Brady emerges as a man tossed about by action, instead of driving it. Mitchum beautifully captures the drifters’ quiet longing for a place to call home, as others decide his fate, in a performance that Lee Server described as “certainly the most poetic and tender of Mitchum’s assorted portrayals of alienated adventurers.”

United Artists. Producer: Chester Erskine. Screenwriter: Robert Ardrey. Cinematographer: Alex Phillips. Editor: Michael Luciano. Cast: Robert Mitchum, Julie London, Gary Merrill, Albert Dekker, Jack Oakie.

35mm, Technicolor, 98 min.