Mackenna's Gold

From the producer, director and star of The Guns of Navarone (1961) comes this piece of toxic sludge masquerading as a Western. Mackenna's Gold (1969) is an atrocious mess, an attempt at an epic adventure that has no idea of what to do or how to achieve it. On the plus side, you get to see Omar Sharif play a Mexican!

Marshal Sam Mackenna (Greogry Peck) is given a map by a dying Indian that reveals a huge treasure hidden in a remote canyon. Mackenna destroys the map, only to be taken hostage by outlaw Colorado (Omar Sharif), who demands that Mackenna take him to the gold. Also somehow involved in the plot are the kidnapped daughter (Camilla Spav) of a local dignitary, an Indian ex-lover of Mackenna (Julie Newmar), a greedy cavalryman (Telly Savalas), a hulking Indian (Ted Cassidy), renegade Apaches and a gaggle of gold-hungry townspeople (check below for God's sake).

Producer Carl Foreman and director J. Lee Thompson are clearly trying to recycle the Navarone formula: big stars, big action, big locations. It even starts out with a lengthy expositional narration and similar opening titles. But everything that went right with Navarone is botched here. Instead of a well-plotted, thrilling, large-scale action adventure, Mackenna's Gold is a disjointed, unfocused, and worst of all, boring mess.

The film's "plot" is pretty straightforward on paper, but a million diversions prevent a coherent pace or narrative drive from developing. Good ideas rattle around without amounting to anything substantial, many dropped without explanation. The huge ensemble cast must have cost a pretty penny, but any potential for a Major Dundee-esque ensemble adventure is botched when they're wiped out in one fell swoop. Carl Foreman's script is unusually inept, from the lame dialogue to the slip-shod story structure. The action scenes are decent - the best being a shootout on a ferry trapped mid-river - but in lieu of context they don't amount to much. The movie doesn't even work on a dubious camp level, aside from Omar Sharif's more egregious moments (particularly his impromptu mariachi dance). For the most part, it just plain sucks.

Thompson's direction is good: he handles the action scenes reasonably well, and Joseph Macdonald's cinematography is undeniably gorgeous. The special effects are so-so: the climactic earthquake (apparently using a real canyon) is quite impressive, but the rest of the film is marred by obvious use of miniatures and rear-projection, which ruins the effect. Quincy Jones contributes a decent score marred by Jose Feliciano's cornball song about vultures.

Gregory Peck is dependably stiff and heroic, but Omar Sharif is badly miscast, laughably unconvincing as either a Mexican ("Aye Chihuahua!") or a bad guy. Personally, I can't wait to see his take on Che Guevara. Julie Newmar isn't convincing as an Apache but she's at least pleasant to look at. Telly Savalas is hammy as usual. The sheer number of stars who turn up in sixty-second bit parts is baffling: why go to all the trouble of enlisting Edward G. Robinson (Cheyenne Autumn), Eli Wallach (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), Lee J. Cobb (On the Waterfront), Burgess Meredith (Rocky), Raymond Massey (49th Parallel) and Anthony Quayle (Lawrence of Arabia) if you're just going to whack them all immediately?

Mackenna's Gold is, in the last anaylsis, a misbegotten mish-mash of half-baked ideas and a colossal waste of time, money and talent. It's a big ball of wasted effort, and its very existence makes this viewer sad.