Later they throw in with the Juaristas, but only after they have been double crossed by the French. When they are offered a choice between working for the French army forces who can pay them well or the Mexican Juaristas who offer only a noble cause, the two men unhesitatingly choose the side that pays them well. However it is not quite that simple, and Trane’s characters contains some of the taint of mercenary motives, as we shall see.īoth men are hired guns who are seeking to make money out of the conflict in Mexico.
It is tempting to see Ben Trane (Gary Cooper) as the old-fashioned hero of the western, and Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster) as the new type of anti-hero that would soon take over from him.
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The movie has two protagonists, what Aldrich called a hero and an anti-hero. This is another aspect of the movie that makes it seem ahead of its time. Indeed the story moves so quickly that there are 1130 edits in 90 minutes, making the average length of a shot 5 seconds. What we have instead is a colourful and lively western that is packed with a remarkable amount of incident for a 90-minute film. The viewer is not invited to wince or feel shocked by what is on screen. It is cynical but the tone is essentially humorous. For all its cynicism there is nothing too brutal about Vera Cruz. Nonetheless the movie lies part-way between the movies of its own age and the movies to come. However it did anticipate the direction in which westerns would eventually travel – one where the heroes are motivated by money more than morals, and will sell themselves to the highest bidder, unless they can double cross them too. Vera Cruz certainly did not signal the end of the ‘noble western’. The Wild Bunch concerns a group of outlaws who have no objection to shooting civilians or using human shields. A Fistful of Dollars opens with its nameless hero continuing to sip water and refusing to intervene while a child is being hurt. Nonetheless the protagonists, while not actually amoral, had distinctly more lax moral codes than before.
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Even these new anti-heroes had some standards of decency, and followed their own code of ethics. This was not as far away from the old westerns as some like to think. With the advent of directors such as Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, a new and more cynical vision of the west emerged. They certainly would not shoot women and children, and would even go out of their way to protect them. They did not shoot horses unless they were suffering. However they followed certain moral standards. They could be brutal lawmen who broke the rules when it suited them, or they could be outlaws and gunfighters. In these westerns the heroes were certainly not angels. It is not a spaghetti western of course, but it was an early indicator of what the western was to become during the 1960s.įor several decades, the movie industry had produced what I, to coin a phrase, call the ‘noble western’. Robert Aldrich’s 1954 western, Vera Cruz has been described as the first spaghetti western.
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