This is a story about an extreme case of irony, as well as the sometimes fine line between justice(trial and punishment via the justice system) and revenge(trial and punishment carried out by vigilante status). 4 men(The gang of 4) scheduled to be hanged in the morning for the murder of a bank teller and attempted robbery are set free by a phony executioner who weasels his way into the jail supposedly to size up his charge, but disabling the sheriff, allowing them to escape. The real executioner had traveled from another town, and apparently was murdered by the phony on his way. Apparently, no one in this town knew the looks of the real executioner(very surprising), so why the phony was successful. The phony timed his jail visit to coincide with a special evening Catholic church, to which nearly everyone in the town attended, thus clearing the way for the Gang of 4 to escape through town. Soon, a posse is organized to hunt them down. Gregory Peck(as Douglas)joins this posse, but often hunts alone. He is especially intent on killing these men because they presumably raped and killed his wife and stole his life savings in a bag. Were they seen or heard killing his wife? no. He was told they were riding around the vicinity approximately when she was killed. This should have been a warning that the case against them was not definitive. That should have been a warning that he should be conservative in assuming their guilt. Late in the film, Douglas comes upon a combination of oral and physical evidence that apparently they were not the killers of his wife. In fact, the one of the 4 still alive at that point relates evidence that one of them(Stephen Boyd, as Zachary) shot and killed the real killer for reasons of greed and privacy in raping the woman hostage. The whole story of tangled happenings and motives turns into a case of extreme irony. Douglas is more than shocked that he apparently has killed 3 men who were not responsible for his wife's death or robbery. He goes to the town cathedral and prays for forgiveness, and discusses the matter with the priest, who reminds him that he was legally justified in killing these men, as he was part of an official posse with authority to bring them back dead or alive. But, this does not immediately satisfy him, as he killed them not for what they had been convicted of, but rather for their assumed, but not proved, guilt in killing his wife.Question: What happened to Lujan, the only one of the 4 that Douglas didn't kill, and provided the key to solving the mystery? He was still an escaped fugitive from justice. Apparently, it was felt this was not of sufficient interest to the audience to pursue?Question: Why did Emma suddenly run out of the cathedral during the evening church service to her shop, which just happened to be where the Gang of 4 decided to hide after their jail break and before they found some horses to ride? Also, was their initial reason for kidnapping her to exchange her for safe passage to Mexico, or to satisfy their lust, or both?Joan Collins plays Josefa: an old girl friend of Douglas, who wants to be reinstated as such, upon learning that his wife had died. She is often criticized as being too demure and non-Latino in looks and speech to make a believable Latino ranch manager. This didn't bother me. Stephen Boyd, Lee Van Cleef, Albert Sami, and Henri Silva played the Gang of 4. Andrew Duggan played the padre, who soothed Douglas' conscience. Kathleen Gallant played Emma.See it on YouTube

This Western from 1958 is surprisingly not dated. The locations are beautiful. The story is good, believable and well paced. No crazy Western antics and over heroic things. The cast is top notch which should make you want to tune in. No crazy heroics or silly dialog.Gregory Peck plays a farmer whose wife was killed. He has been chasing after a bunch of outlaws who are about to be hung. But they escape with a hostage and he goes after them. Joan Collins plays an old flame and she is not out of place at all. Stephen Boyd plays one of the outlaws.There is a modern twist and moral. Better than many Westerns that came after it.Worth watching.

Even though I think that actor Gregory Peck is too much of a dandy, and not well-suited to play a cowboy, THE BRAVADOS, as a Western, is surprisingly good entertainment.After 6 months on the dusty trail, Jim Douglas arrives in the small, border town of Rio Arilla to witness the hanging of 4 men. Even though these men were arrested for an unrelated crime, Jim is positively certain that they are the ones responsible for the rape and murder of his beloved wife.Through the help of a deceitful executioner, these 4 accused men escape from jail, taking with them Emma Gallant, a shopkeeper's daughter, as a hostage.Outraged at their escape from confinement, the vengeful Douglas takes it upon himself to hunt down these 4 fugitives, and when he finds them, he mercilessly guns them down, one by one, in cold blood.When Douglas discovers that these criminals (though justly convicted of murder) had nothing to do with his wife's death, he is forced to ask himself whether he's any better than they are.Released in 1958 - THE BRAVADOS is a brutally grim and compelling tale of blind, unforgiving revenge.

I'm not sure the title makes much sense. "The Bravados." I guess you can have a couple of people called the bravados in the same way that you can have desperadoes, but while people can be collectively desperate, few collectivities would exhibit "bravado," which means "boldness intended to impress or intimidate." Certainly nobody in this movies does. I take it that someone was assigned the task of coming up with a properly Western-sounding title and said, "Well, what the hell. It's better than 'The Guns of Darkness'." In the quiet little Western town of Rio Arriba or whatever it is, four men are to be hanged in the morning for felony murder -- the rapacious Steven Boyd, the bullock-like Albert Salmi, the nervous and ratty Lee Van Cleef, and the canny Indian, Henry Silva. Into the town rides the mysterious figure of Gregory Peck, looking grim and determined, waiting for the hanging.But it never happens! The four felons escape, taking a pretty young woman hostage. The posse takes off after them, except for Peck, the most resolved of the hunters, who -- knowing that they will hold the posse off at the pass until daylight -- goes to sleep in his hotel room, ready for a fresh start with a rested horse in the morning.That's the first hint of John Ford's "The Searchers," which appeared two years earlier. Both are revenge Westerns in which the protagonist will simply not be put off but keeps coming, filled with hatred, only to find at the end that his rage has misled him."The Searchers" is a superior film, more subtle in many ways, more fully fleshed out with character and humor, but "The Bravados" is a rattling good tale too. You will never be bored.The excitement is due chiefly to some of the performances and to the direction and the plot takes some of the sheen from Peck's usually unimpeachable rectitude. He catches up with the four men, one by one. The first is Van Cleef. When Peck disarms him and has him on his knees, he shows Van Cleef a photo of his wife, whom he claims Van Cleef and the rest raped and killed at his ranch. Van Cleef, in one of his best scenes, confesses to past crimes but insists he's never seen Peck's wife. He begs for his life. In return, Peck kicks him in the face once or twice and shoots him in the back of the head. We don't know what Peck does to the next miscreant, Salmi, but it was probably pretty savage. The posse find Salmi hanging by his feet from a tree. The third man, Boyd, is shot in the chest before he has a chance to draw his pistol. No doubt Boyd deserved it. He has a "weakness" for women. When left alone with the sexy hostage, he turns utterly slimy, feeling the hem of her long dress and petticoats and beginning his planned assault by asking, "Is that silk?" The Indian's case is a little more complicated and it requires Peck to register first disbelief, then guilt. He handles it okay. It's well within his range as an actor.Henry King directed it and did a good job too. The movie lacks a sense of place though. Lots of Mexicans around -- this is only a two- or three-day ride from the border -- but otherwise the settings are generic and functional. Rio Arriba is a typical dusty town with a hotel, an adjoining saloon, a jail house, a mercantile store, and a great big church. That's it for the community. Oh, Joan Collins is around mainly to provide Peck with a substitute for his ravaged wife, and when she goes to church she's given one of those tall black mantillas that come from Spain. Her performance is less than convincing. The script and performances, however, nicely individualize the four escapees. The locations -- around Jalisco and in Michoacan, where my barber and guru Luis comes from -- are pretty without being distinctive: rolling hills of pine forest with jagged sawtooth mountains on the horizon. Some clichés are avoided. Nobody's life depends on a fast draw, and when we first see Peck's little daughter she looks like an unkempt street urchin. Some clichés are eagerly welcomed. Peck removes his hat after riding a hundred miles and his 1950s haircut looks freshly done and moussed by the studio barber. He is clean shaven -- and I mean void of any hint of stubble.I swear that, at times, some of the incidents are so nearly original that I began to wonder if maybe Henry King hadn't caught them by mistake or maybe the editor had chosen the wrong take. When Peck confronts Boyd in the Mexican cantina, for instance, we don't expect Peck to interrupt the conversation by suddenly drawing his pistol and firing it -- and neither, it appears, does Boyd the actor. He looks surprised, as if a mistake had been made. A less imaginative director would have handled it much differently.