From the Rental Vault (1969): 100 Rifles

It's hard for us to believe it, but 100 Rifles was a controversial movie when it was released in 1969. Not because it was too violent -- The Wild Bunch was going to hold on to that title for awhile. Not because it had a little nudity -- no small number of pictures had showed more by that time and would show even more afterwards.

No, 100 Rifles was controversial because it featured one of mainstream Hollywood's first interracial love scenes, between co-stars Jim Brown and Raquel Welch. Something that we wouldn't blink at today raised more than a couple of eyebrows just more than forty years ago.

Brown plays Lyedecker, an Arizona lawman chasing a bank robber into Mexico in 1912. The robber, Yaqui Joe, is half Yaqui Indian and stole the money to buy guns to arm his people against their oppressors. Burt Reynolds plays Yaqui Joe, and Welch plays Sarita, a female leader of the Yaqui guerrillas. Fernando Lamas is General Verdrugo, whose autocratic rule of the Mexican state of Sonora requires a pacified Yaqui people -- and whether that happens because they lay down their arms or because they're laid six feet under the earth is of no consequence to him.

Lyedecker and Joe are held prisoner by Verdrugo until freed by Sarita and the Yaqui. While on the run, Lydeecker must decide if he will help the Yaqui in their fight or take Joe back to Arizona to face trial.

Aside from the controversy over the Brown-Welch love scene, there's not a lot worth remembering about 100 Rifles. Some of that comes from director Tom Gries, who spends too much time filming different groups of people riding across unremarkable stretches of Spanish scrubland that stand in for Mexico. Only a year earlier Gries had directed Charlton Heston in Will Penny -- one of that actor's best roles and probably Gries' best work as a writer and as a director. But here he lacks fire, scope and any real sense of a linear point A to point B plan for his movie.

Much of the problem comes from the story, written by Clair Huffaker from a novel by Robert MacLeod. We may be used to an evil villain strategically inept though convinced of his own brilliance, and 100 Rifles supplies that in Verdrugo. He repeatedly fails to anticipate the Yaqui responses to his actions or take advantage of his enemies' own strategic weaknesses. And those are also many. The guerrillas and their rifles flee from Verdrugo and stop in a Yaqui village. Scouts alert them that the general -- who has been following them since they rescued Lyedecker and Joe -- is close behind. Now, what do you think a vicious general who aims to exterminate the Yaqui will do when he learns one of their villages is nearby and his quarry may have passed its way? If you picked "Kill most of its adults, kidnap its children as hostages and burn it to the ground," you're smarter than Lyedecker, Joe, Sarita and every Yaqui guerrilla in that band.

Of the lead cast, only Reynolds and Lamas offer much. Reynolds seems to recognize the ridiculous story he's in so he goes into full smart-aleck Bandit mode, mugging and grinning as much as this movie lets him. Lamas throws a big slab of ham on the grill and proceeds to chew whatever scenery he can sink his teeth into. Brown and Welch aren't exactly bad, but neither of them had developed yet into actors that can transcend their material, and this is material that desperately needs transcending.

100 Rifles may seem like a paint-by-numbers Western, but its lack of focus, screwy story and average or below performances make it more like a paint-by-numbers without the numbers.