Certification. A
Running Time. 2 hours 3 mins
Director. Richard Brooks
Cast. Ralph Bellamy, Claudia Cardinale, Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, Robert Ryan, Woody Strode.
Rating. 63%
The 1960s were undoubtedly the peak of the assemble a crack team film - The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Guns Of Navarone (1961), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969). And in The Professionals, the wealthy Texan tycoon, J.W. Grant (Ralph Bellamy) hires four hard-boiled mercenaries to rescue his kidnapped wife, Maria (Claudia Cardinale) from a nefarious Mexican revolutionary, Jesus Raza (Jack Palance).
The first half of The Professionals is nigh on perfect. From the character introductions and exposition to the way director Richard Brooks builds to the main action set piece, mid-film, is exemplary.
The ensemble cast is strong throughout, albeit Robert Ryan's, Woody Strode's and, to a lesser extent Jack Palance's characters are all underwritten.
The feisty Claudia Cardinale previews her portrayal of Jill McBain two years ahead of Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West. Similarly, Lee Marvin represents the grizzled voice of authority, Rico Fardan a role he would practically revisit a year later as Major John Reisman in The Dirty Dozen.
Marvin's understated performance allows Burt Lancaster to shine as the charming and charismatic Bill Dolworth, the explosives expert. In 1960, Richard Brooks was awarded the Academy Award for a Screenplay Based On Material From Another Medium for Elmer Gantry, in which Burt Lancaster starred as the eponymous Elmer Gantry, a charming, loquacious travelling salesman turned evangelical preacher. Brooks was supremely confident Lancaster could deliver, and the resulting interplay between Rico and Dolworth is wonderful,
Bill Dolworth: "$100,000 for a wife? She must be a lot of woman."
Rico: "Certain women have a way of changing boys into men and some men back into boys."
and,
Rico: "So what else is on your mind besides hundred-proof women, and ninety-proof whiskey, and fourteen-carat gold?"
Bill Dolworth: "Amigo, you just wrote my epitaph!"
Wonderfully paced, The Professionals is surprisingly unpredictable. For beyond the action, Brooks delivers a character study of loyalty and moral ambiguity.
Not quite a revisionist western, The Professionals might be one of the most masculine westerns of its time, as the main protagonists resolutely all have their own sense of what it means to be a man.
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