ChanBot i must have seen a different film!!

HeadlinesExotic Boring

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

rchristiananderson The story is clever, the production value is all there, and the acting talent is present... but this film is poorly directed with a distracting and overblown music score. There are clear merits to this film and Mitchum gives his all to make his character solid ... but because of the weak direction, his Mexican accent is almost flawless in some scenes, but nonexistent in others. This goes back and forth for the duration of the film. Some of the Mexcian accents spoken by some actors are not only poorly executed, with dialogue that is stereotypical, as well. This distracts greatly from the story and production values here. The overblown soundtrack is about as bad as it gets. It makes me think Alex North was dying for attention and wanted his music to be heard over the action. The music has little to do with the mood of what is happening on screen. Music should enhance the drama... here the music fights for attention. Some of the worst arrangements I've heard. At times the music sounds festive and celebratory in scenes which are supposed to be ominous and frightening. Quite odd and a bit irritating. A remake should be considered because the story is worth telling.... but not this way.

ed_two_o_nine This is a decent if not great Western the ploughs the familiar western fields of redemption. Robert Mitchum is Martin Brady an American who has grown up in Mexico but whom is now back. We witness Brady getting used to his new surroundings and the unexpected knowledge that comes with them, yet we also see him come to terms with the fact that the Americans are just as scheming as the Mexicans they think themselves superior to. Mitchum does reasonably well in this part though he does have a rather strange accent. He gives a good account of a brooding man coming to terms with him self and the political machinery of life. Unfortunately the supporting cast do not fare so well but some of this may well be to do with the sparse two dimensional characters. Again the story or the script does nothing to particularly lift this movie but they are not terrible either. So at the end of the day would I watch this movie again? Probably not unless there really was no alternative viewing. If you're a fan of the western give the movie an additional star.

bkoganbing The Wonderful Country finds Robert Mitchum as a gunslinger, a pistolero working for the local Mexican governor Pedro Armendariz. He had to flee Texas years ago after a shooting and Armendariz gave him shelter and work. Despite that Mitchum is sent across the border on a gun buying trip. Unfortunately he takes a bad fall from a horse and winds up with a broken leg. While on the mend in that bordertown and after, Mitchum finds himself in a series of situations that call him to question what he's been doing and just where he can call home.One of those situations is Julie London, wife of army major Gary Merrill who's got a bit of a past herself. She throws quite a few complications in Mitchum's past.The Wonderful Country is a nicely put together western shot on location in Durango. It was one of the first westerns to use that town in Mexico, a whole lot more in the sixties would follow. Besides those already mentioned the performances to watch for in this film are those of Charles McGraw as the frontier doctor and that of Satchel Paige as the cavalry sergeant. A year later John Ford would come out with Sergeant Rutledge about a black cavalry sergeant and the men around him, but I do believe that baseball immortal Satchel Paige was the first in Hollywood to portray a black cavalry man in a major motion picture.McGraw is something else. He's the doctor who tends to Mitchum's broken leg and befriends him, but then gets one big pang of jealousy about Julie London that leads to tragedy. In real life McGraw was as much the hellraiser as he is in the film.The Wonderful Country had the good fortune to be partially scripted by Tom Lea so his vision of the characters in his own novel remained pretty much intact. This was the only one of two novels by that writer/artist to be filmed.That's as good a reason as any to see a very fine western.

dougbrode The Wonderful Country, the Big Land, the Young Land, The Big Country . . . there were so many westerns during the late 1950s with strikingly similar titles that you needed a score card to keep them all straight. One of the least remembered - though that's a shame - is director Robert Parrish's (from a fine novel by Tom Lea, himself a forgotten figure but a western novelist worth rediscovering by buffs) yarn about a rangy American (Robert Mitchum) who has been hiding out in Mexico, returns to U.S. soil, and discovers that he's virtually a man without a country - he doesn't really belong anywhere. This had to be one of the films that influenced Sergio Leone, and his Man With No Name character played by Clint Eastwood, in that I'm not sure there was an anti-hero wrapped in a serape before Mitchum in this movie. No mule for him, though - he rides a magnificent horse, and his relationship to it - symbolic as well as realistic - will remind you of a later, greater western, Lonely Are the Brave (1962) with Kirk Douglas and 'Whiskey.' Here, the metaphor is kept more subtle. Julie London appears as the sexually frustrated wife of an army commander (Gary Merrill), and while she's certainly beautiful enough for the role, her acting is slightly more stilted and wooden than that of Kim Novak. One neat bit of trivia: This is the only film to co-star the great athlete Satchel Paige, as a 'buffalo soldier' - and here's yet another innovation, for you'd have to search hard and long to find an earlier Hollywood film that depicted members of the black army of the west. Overall, a very good show - not too much action, but gorgeous color and music,, characterizations, and overall atmosphere.