Inadvertent Justice: When a Vigilante Pretends to Join a Posse

The entire populace of the town of Rio Arriba has gathered in the local church, where the priest encourages everyone to pray for the four thieving murderers who are to be hanged the following morning. Even Deputy Primo gets to hear the sermon, having been relieved of the task of guarding the prisoners by the hangman that the town had to send away for. (The innocents of Rio Arriba cannot conduct even a simple execution without assistance from the larger, more cynical world.) As the priest urges forgiveness, however, the so-called hangman proves to be in league with the prisoners who are scheduled to be hanged. They are freed and race out of town.

When the townsfolk discover what has happened a short while later, everyone runs about in a panic as Deputy Primo attempts to organize a posse. The posse consists not only of the able-bodied men, but of practically the entire population. Oddly, a stranger named Jim Douglas (Gregory Peck), who rode into town specifically to watch the hanging, is unwilling to join the posse. Everyone else can spend the night chasing after shadows and trying to force their way though narrow passes that a single gunman could defend against dozens of attackers. But Jim Douglas is going to get some sleep. He'll need it because he is going to track those men down and kill them with his bare hands if he has to.

Rio Arriba has only begun its acquaintance with the gang of "two whites, a half-breed, and an injun," but Douglas has been tracking them for a very long while. He won't be getting himself into a dither just because they've escaped from the local jail. He knows how to trail them; and he will.

The Bravados is one of the finest Westerns I have ever seen. It is strongly plotted and brilliantly paced and actually quite philosophical--a meditation on justice and the roles of individuals and society with regard to the evaluation of evidence and the passing of sentences.

Jim Douglas catches up with the townsfolk the day after they start their pursuit of their very own gang of four. They are tired and inexperienced. He is fresh and knowledgeable. It is the age-old story of the righteous, independent man stepping into a power vacuum and taking charge because he is needed, not because he wants to. But it is handled convincingly and refreshingly.

He manages to track down the members of the gang one at a time and confronts each with a picture of his dead wife. He accuses each of them of having raped and murdered her. They all deny the charges. He doesn't believe them; and neither do we. After all, they started off in prison for an attempted bank robbery during which they shot at the very kind people of Rio Arriba. They abducted a woman in their escape and have demonstrated their intention of raping her (even if they have been prevented from doing so by circumstances). These are preeminently killable men. They are a menace to society. And so what if they won't admit to having raped and killed Douglas' wife? They still deserve to be killed for everything else they've done.

But Jim Douglas knows and the members of the gang know and the audience knows that Douglas is not killing them for anything that they did in Rio Arriba or anywhere else on the planet. He is exacting blood vengeance.

Or at least he's trying to. In fact, he is murdering, one by one, the men who have already avenged his wife's death. They killed the man who raped and murdered Mrs. Douglas; and Douglas owes them a debt of gratitude, not persecution.

He discovers his error only after having killed three of them. The fact that the only gang member left alive is not one of the two whites is a detail that I would like to point out to those who maintain that Dances with Wolves was the first Western to exhibit anything resembling racial sensitivity. (And by the way, it's easy to seem sensitive about a handful of Native Americans when you depict the rest as the incarnation of evil.)

Another very fine touch in The Bravados is the use of Spanish. The action of the narrative occurs along the Mexican border. Predictably, a good deal of the dialogue has to occur in Spanish. The Spanish is not terribly difficult to understand, but would certainly have been subtitled in a lesser film. Director Henry King seems to be plunging us into the milieu of the West, putting us in the position of cowboys who either had to learn Spanish right quick or be frozen out of important conversations. If we want to play, we have to pay attention--just as in life.

The only weaknesses in the film are of the variety that Mark Twain taught me to hold in contempt when I was very young and impressionable: Cooperisms. The novels of James Fenimore Cooper should, according to Twain, be retitled The Broken Twig Series because every time something important is about to happen, one of the characters steps on a twig and alerts everyone to the fact that they should expect something unexpected. In The Bravados, Jim Douglas manages to detect a sniper on a distant ridge because of some movement in the grass. We are asked to accept that he interprets such signs correctly because he has "the eyes of a hunter," but such formulations are only painfully reminiscent of Cooper's obnoxious habit of romanticizing various categories of humanity (hunters, mothers, etc.).

Perhaps the conversation between Douglas and the priest about the pitfalls of setting oneself up as "judge, jury, and executioner" is a bit heavy-handed, but Peck delivers his lines credibly enough that most audiences will be able to swallow them without grimacing. These flaws are minor, however, in a film that is, on the whole, extremely engaging and enjoyable.