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Vera Cruz (1954)

Rate: 7
Viewed: 9/24

VeraC
9/24: Highly influential to The Wild Bunch and the Spaghetti Westerns by Sergio Leone, Vera Cruz garnered a lot of solid reviews back then, and I became curious enough to check it out.

The film turns out to be very good with an interesting contrast of acting styles between Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster. I'm surprised to see how dominant the latter was and how well the former held his ground when lesser actors would've been completely under his shadow.

All draped in black, Burt Lancaster plays a quite likeable character for a hard-to-figure-out heel with a violent streak, and it's too bad to see him be gunned down with nobody telling him how much better he could be than that. The ending is actually shocking based on how it went down, and Gary Cooper's character didn't want to do it but had to.

Shot on location in Mexico with the sight of Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, the action is aplenty with some great movie moments. However, the editing peeves me the most. It's so herky-jerky in many places, giving me a hard time getting used to the storytelling, which explains why Alan Crosland, Jr., never edited another film. Happily, Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster give more-than-enough performances to let me ignore the flaw. By the way, Vera Cruz is the final time that Charles Bronson would be credited as Charles Buchinsky.

All in all, Vera Cruz is a watchable Western in many ways, and it ranks among ten greatest performances ever by Burt Lancaster.