Movie Monday: The Wrath of God

I came across the trailer to 1972's The Wrath of God--a movie I had never heard of before--at work. Once I saw it featured Robert Mitchum as a machine gun-wielding preacher, and featured Victor Buono, Frank Langella, and Rita Hayworth(!) in the cast, I knew I had to see it!

The film opens in a very Wild Bunch-y way: In some unknown Mexican town, three "revolutionaries" are gunned down in the street. As they fall, the screen turns red, and we get our title, zooming out at the audience:

We meet Irish adventurer Emmet Keough (Ken Hutchinson), who has finally scrounged up enough money to buy a train ticket out of this town. He is offered a bootlegging job by a local businessman named Jennings (Buono), and when he turns the job down, Jennings has Keough's ticket and passport stolen. Later, Keough meets a beautiful Indian girl named Chela (Paula Pritchett), and he is forced to risk his life saving her from being raped by some local hoods.

 

Keough is strung up, about to die of hanging, when Catholic priest Oliver Van Horne (Mitchum) shows up, and...persuades the bad guys to rethink their actions:

Soon after, Van Horne, Keough, and Jennings are arrested and sentenced to be executed. After an inventive use of the subjective camera during the execution scene (a nice goofy touch from director Ralph Nelson), they are spared by Colonel Santilla (John Colicos), who says they won't be executed if they do a little "job" for him.

The job entails assassinating a local warlord, a real loose wire who keeps his people in the iron grip of repression. His name is Thomas De La Planta and is played by an impossibly young Frank Langella. His mother is played by none other than screen legend Rita Hayworth, in her last film role:

Apparently Hayworth was already starting to suffer from the Alzheimer's Disease that would later (much later) take her life, and I think you can see a little of that here: she sort of seems like she's in a different movie than the rest of the actors. Her scenes are minimal, and short, but it's still a thrill seeing someone from Hollywood's Golden Age showing up in what (then) such a post-modern movie. While she is Thomas' mother, Hayworth's character is a deeply religious woman and is happy to have a priest in town, thinking it will help save the souls of the locals.

Our three heroes hatch a plot (pretending to be investors in the town's local mining operation) to lure La Planta out into the desert and kill him, but (as you might have guessed) it doesn't quite work out that way. The Wrath of God has a kind of sleepy, laconic tone, led by Mitchum, despite the occasional burst of violence. Barney Miller's Gregory Sierra shows up as a one-eyed bandito, who gets in a fistfight with Keough, and the final ten minutes or so is one long action sequence that's both funny and kinda horrifying.

I did enjoy The Wrath of God, though it wasn't quite the lost classic I was envisioning when I saw the aforementioned trailer and cast. Still, Mitchum is a lot of fun (of course), and enough general 1970s weirdness to make it worth your time.