Word: widmark
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...Secret Ways (Heath; U-l), from the thriller novel by Scotland's Alistair MacLean, is, like most of his works (H.M.S. Ulysses, The Guns of Navarone), a derring-documentary that celebrates courage-for-a-cause. Hero Richard Widmark starts out believing that "everybody's learned to live by compromise," changes his mind after he and the audience have spent 112 minutes of sadism, gunplay, torture, capture and escape, cliffhanging, ledge-crawling, escape and capture. It is easily the most relentless movie chase since The Great Train Robbery...
...make it the worst. Shot in Todd-AO and exposed on color film that is practically fluorescent, the movie was produced on location in a $1,500,000 replica of the Alamo and the village around it, employs 1,500 horses and seven instantly recognizable human beings (Wayne, Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey, Richard Boone, Frankie Avalon, Linda Cristal, Chill Wills). Released as a reserved-seat feature ($1.50-$3.50), it is said to have cost $12 million. Predicts one shrewd old Hollywood range rider, Director John (Stagecoach) Ford: "It will run forever...
When the film finally does get down to historical cases, it proves to be shamelessly inaccurate. Two leading characters. Colonel William B. Travis (Laurence Harvey) and Jim Bowie (Richard Widmark), are respectively nastified and sissified almost out of recognition for theatrical effect. The Mexican army, apparently in deference to the large Mexican movie market, is presented as a body of sensitive young men who look as though they all have college degrees and suffer every time they pull a trigger. And at one point, just in case the teen-agers don't dig all that ancient history. Singer Avalon...
Warlock (20th Century-Fox) is a two-hour, $2,000,000 western with three major stars (Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn), two main heroes, two main villains, three main plots, five subplots, eight cooling corpses, and nine major outbreaks of violence. Hero No. 1 (Fonda), a sort of Good Bad Guy, is a notorious gunman who wears gold-handled Colts. The townspeople of Warlock ask him to protect them from Villain No. 1 (Tom Drake), a Bad Bad Guy with a slow sneer, a fast draw, and plenty of sneaking dry-gulchers on his payroll. Unfortunately, Hero...
...Cobb) wanted by the federal police, who takes over a small town in southern California, uses it as a base from which to stage his escape to Mexico. Unfortunately, the mobster has forgotten to fix the scriptwriters, who permit him to be captured by the hero (Richard Widmark) and his kid brother (Earl Holliman), who are involved in a nasty sibling rivalry over the kid brother's wife (Tina Louise). Anyway, they all start out across a gangster-infested desert in the direction of the nearest police station. Groans Actor Cobb: "It's gonna be a long...