El hombre de Río Malo

American Lee Van Cleef and Englishman James Mason join Gina Lollobrigida and a number of unfamiliar European players for this spaghetti western about the Mexican Revolution of the teen years. For James Mason this marked his first appearance in a horse opera albeit not a genuine American one.

For the most part I'm a firm believer that the only real westerns are done in the western hemisphere and Bad Man's River won't convince any of you I'm wrong. It's a comic western, but western icon Lee Van Cleef just does not have a comic bone in his body. As for Gina Lollobrigida she pairs off far better with Rock Hudson and I'm sure she wished she was making another comedy with him.

Mason is a revolutionary and Gina his wife. She's also the former wife of outlaw Lee Van Cleef and they find it might be to their mutual advantage to pull off a caper. Easier said than done however and Gina has quite the surprise in the end.

According to the Citadel Film series book on the films of James Mason he didn't think much of Bad Man's River and I agree.

This eccentric Euro-Western has more in common with the revisionist, light-hearted approach of BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) than with any of the sadistic Italian fare shot around the same time and on the same locations. A great, eclectic cast (Lee Van Cleef, James Mason, Gina Lollobrigida, Sergio Fantoni, Jess Hahn, Simon Andreu, Eduardo Fajardo, Gianni Garko, Diana Lorys) finds itself somewhat stranded - and in the case of Mason, evidently embarrassed - in the face of the film's bizarre changes of mood, some of which work (there are a few enjoyably comical action sequences) and some of which don't (why the director chose to overdose on the "freeze-frame" stuff at the beginning is anyone's guess); in light of all this, the involvement of talented Hollywood veterans Philip Yordan, Irving Lerner and Bernard Gordon is even more baffling. All in all, however, BAD MAN'S RIVER emerges as a surprisingly pleasant, if ultimately forgettable, diversion.

I have seen this film in a double feature together with SABATA and it fell clearly short in comparison with the latter. The cast is good(Van Cleef, James Mason, Eduardo Fajardo and Gina Lollobrigida) and the "sets"(e.g. a riverboat) are somewhat original. But the score is mostly annoying and the story was unable to really involve me(Don't ask me intensely about the plot!). The Comedy is often fast paced and sometimes mildly funny.

For people who like the country/pop/rock score, however, things might look certainly different.

3 / 10.

Lovable rogue Lee Van Cleef steals from banks and blows things up for a living. He and his gang are hired by James Mason to explode an Army munitions stockpile in Mexico, using a luxury riverboat as a base of operations, only to be pulled into a bigger scheme that digs them even deeper into the revolution.

Like most of the Mexican Revolution spaghetti westerns (A Bullet For The General being one exception), this is an acquired taste. Production values are a little iffy and it does run out of steam a bit near the end. On the whole though, there's certainly a lot of action and adventure to make up for it's shortcomings.

A Spanish-made, but American-produced minor addition to the genre, this benefits from the participation of Hollywood veterans Philip Yordan and Bernard Gordon, as well as Van Cleef, Mason, and a few familiar European favorites like Aldo Sambrell, Eduardo Fajardo, Gianni Garko, Diana Lorys, and the beautiful Gina Lollabrigida.

An oddball soundtrack goes from really dated vocal-quartets, to early-seventies style hard rock, with a marching band in-between!

Recommended mainly for Van Cleef fanatics.

Wow, did the soundtrack for this film stink...and I mean STINK! Imagine if the same person who scored some of the old Rankin-Bass Christmas specials got together with a guy who produces elevator music--that's what the music from this film sounds like! The horrible lyrics and music are completely wrong for an Italian "Spaghetti Western"--and are about as far removed from the great Ennio Morricone (who scored all the greatest films of the genre) scores as you can get. It's full of weird Lawrence Welk-style singing, weird European rock and whatever else they felt like haphazardly chucking into it. And, sadly music is one of the biggest reasons you'd want to see one of these Italian westerns in the first place. Because of this, I nominate this film for the most god-awful soundtrack in film history. If there's a worse one, I'd love to hear about it! Another big reason to see the films is the incredibly tough characters and style. This film stars the meanest and scariest of the bad-men, Lee Van Cleef. Yet, inexplicably, they decided to make this one a bit of a comedy!!! Lee Van Cleef in a western comedy?! That makes about as much sense as Richard Nixon becoming one of the backup singers for Diana Ross!! Van Cleef should NEVER, EVER be in a comedy.

The rest of the cast, apart from the no-name Italians who play most of the minor roles, is pretty odd as well. None other than James Mason co-stars (a guy who seemed totally out of place in the genre and sported a weird accent to say the least). And looking quite fetching, Italian star Gina Lollobrigida.

So, at the outset, this film had some pretty substantial strikes against it. Could the rest of the film overcome this goofiness?! Well, not really. While there were a few good moments, too much emphasis on bad comedy that fell flat was the film's undoing. One of the worst scenes that was supposed to be funny was the scene where the bad guys came to talk to the Federale commander and then began throwing dynamite about--it was sloppy, impossible to believe and not the lest bit entertaining. Overall, a bad film that just didn't work, the plot never gels and is clearly among the least interesting Italian westerns I've ever seen. Thank you Eugenio Martin for putting the BAD in "Bad Man's River"!