100 Rifles

The movie takes place during a bloody time period of Mexico history… At that time, anyone coming to Mexico ought to be speaking Spanish… But Lyedecker (Jim Brown) didn't speak the language… He was a black policeman looking for a valuable man, a bank robber named Joe Herrera (Burt Reynolds), who looks Mexican but doesn't talk Mexican… Herrera is a half-breed, whose mother was a Yaqui Indian and his father was from Alabama…

General Verdugo (Fernando Lamas) is sure that the money was not spent on women or on Whisky… For him, Joe stole the $6,000 from the Citizen's Bank in Phoenix, Arizona to buy 100 rifles for his people, the Yaqui Indians…

Verdugo—a murderer and an assassin who runs the State of Sonora—have orders to get rid of the Yaquis any way he could, and he took the easy way by killing everybody… He even kidnapped Yaqui children to regain the rifles… And now he wants Lyedecker's head on a stick in the middle of the plaza for everyone to see…

Lyedecker doesn't care about nothing and nobody… He took a job that nobody else wanted… His intentions are to take Joe back for the $200 reward and a permanent job… The policeman rejected any deal in spite of all the atrocities he witnessed like executing Indians or hanging them up like a side of beef…

Steven Grimes (Dan O'Herlihy)—who runs the railroad— doesn't want his train to be a small sacrifice to the mean general… The German military adviser Lt. Von Klemme (Eric Braeden) thinks that the Indians must be finished off as quickly as possible before more guns come through… Raquel Welch's most audacious moment comes out when the Indians attack a well-guarded train carrying troops and supplies, and she was openly showering in the flat part, under a water tower…

With a very nice score by Jerry Goldsmith, "100 Rifles" is a slam-bang action epic, with loads of explosions and gory fighting, making little sense but a lot of amusing noise