BANDOLERO! (1968)

   Jimmy Stewart, Dean Martin, Raquel Welch, Roy Barcroft, Andrew V. McLaglen (director).

   Bandolero! is probably Dean Martin’s best film. Here he played the outlaw leader Dee Bishop, who botches a bank robbery and gets caught. He is saved at the gallows by his brother Mace (Stewart), who impersonates a traveling professional hangman. On the way out of town they accidentally kidnap the beautiful senorita Maria (Welch), whose husband they had killed in the robbery and whom widowhood had made the richest person in the county. Off they go across the border. The senorita has not been to Mexico since her marriage, but she knows the countryside and the bandolero leader. Much of the film is devoted to displaying Welch’s charms. Just before Dee and Mace are killed in the final gunfight, Dee and Maria fall in love, though we never really know why. The sheriff (George Kennedy) is also madly in love with Maria (though she is not in love with him) and pursues the outlaws, foolishly hoping to impress her. Kennedy plays a good-hearted, honest but inept bumpkin, certainly not worthy of the wealthy and refined senorita. Andrew V. McLaglen’s film has great scenery and wonderful music by Jerry Goldsmith. It is a beautiful story, a 1960s pre-Vietnamera Western showing that cultural changes are on the way. One way that Bandolero!bridges this major cultural transition period is through Stewart’s character. Here is a Western that is moving past the classicWestern era, yet Stewart’s character has not changed. Stewart is oddly teamed with Martin and Welch, who are playing characters from a different kind of Western.