06 · 25 · 26

RIO LOBO and SOLDIER BLUE, two westerns starring Jorge Rivero

Rafael Aviña

A contemporary western like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) is Rio Lobo (1970) by the legendary filmmaker Howard Hawks (1896-1977), the same creator of Rio Bravo and To Have and Have Not. This film, shot in locations such as Cuernavaca, Morelos; Sonora; and Arizona, begins with a unique opening credits sequence, where the audience watches a man tenderly playing the guitar to the rhythm of a lovely song—composed by the great musician Jerry Goldsmith—. Jorge Rivero plays Pierre Cardona—a captain born in Louisiana, son of a Mexican man and a French woman—, who, at the end of the US-American Civil War, leads a group of Confederate soldiers in order to steal shipments of gold from the Union army, commanded by Colonel Cord McNally— played by none other than John Wayne.

Nevertheless, both end up fighting together against a ruthless sheriff—played by Mike Henry, the former American football player for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Los Angeles Rams—and his henchmen in the border area of Rio Lobo, Texas, where women are badly treated. Shasta Delany (played by Jennifer O’Neill), an US-American girl, falls in love with Cardona. Meanwhile, two voluptuous ladies make their appearance, each showing a generous neckline: the very beautiful Susana Dosamantes as María del Carmen, and Sherry Lansing as Amelita are represented as sensual Mexican girls, as Hollywood standards of that time dictated.

In a sequence, Amelita covers her chest before Rivero—who wears a gabán [a traditional Mexican coat] similar to those worn by Clint Eastwood at the time—and offers him beans with chili and tortillas to eat. Later, she is brutally scarred on her charming face by Sheriff Tom, whom she ends up killing by shooting him at the end. Undoubtedly, the 74-year-old veteran Hawks shows astonishing effectiveness in his last film. We can witness this through his magnificent opening sequence of the train robbery, using ropes and wasps, at the cost of enormous ecological destruction—all this thanks to Leigh Brackett’s script, his distinguished collaborator.

There are many similarities with other Hawks films, such as the previously mentioned Rio Bravo and El Dorado. In the same way, in these movies the veteran John Wayne stands beside a younger hero—in this case the then Mexican film heartthrob Jorge Rivero, protagonist of films like Al rojo vivo, Sin salida or Paraíso—, where he displayed his phenomenal physique and his  characteristic role as the attractive and irresistible man, or, in other words, the unbeatable Latin lover, as we frequently see in Rio Lobo. The heroine, embodied by Jennifer O’Neill, commented on Rivero: “Are all Mexicans like him? A kiss and an explosion.”

Ralph Nelson (1916-1987), another efficient and experienced filmmaker—responsible for titles like Lilies of the Field, Requiem for a Heavyweight or Charly—, made Soldier Blue in 1970, where Jorge Rivero plays the role of Spotted Wolf, the leader of an Indigenous tribe that had previously kept captive the beautiful blonde protagonist Cresta Maribel Lee (Candice Bergen), whom the Soldier Honus Gantz (Peter Strauss) gradually falls in love with. Both survive an attack by the Cheyenne, and Honus is in charge of escorting the lady to a military fortification, since she is about to marry Lieutenant McNair (Bod Carraway). On their journey, they face the adversities of desert: the merciless sunrays, and the presence of an arms dealer, played by Donald Pleasence. Shortly after, this “Soldier blue”—as Creta nicknames Gantz—comes to the conclusion that the military government of his nation is fiercer and much more lethal than the “salvage Indegenous”. 

Based on the real and violent Sand Creek massacre that occurred in a Cheyenne village in 1864, Soldier Blue rather than a traditional western,  it is a social and political revisionist drama that intended to create a parallelism with what happened in the US in 1970 regarding its military and interventionist position in Vietnam—particularly  the events that occurred in the village of My Lai in 1968, in southern Vietnam.

Cresta and Gantz can’t prevent the brutal and vengeful killing of women, men, and children from the Cheyenne tribe that Colonel Iverson (John Anderson) commanded. Cresta vehemently repudiates her country, while Gantz is arrested for his attempts to stop the massacre. Nelson’s film, shot in Sonora and Chihuahua, was a turning point in cinematic violence, as it includes sanguinary sequences—some of which were censored and cut from the original footage to, finally, turn into a cult film.

Translated by Michelle Olvera