Revengers
releases on DVD on May 20th, 2014 from CBS Home Entertainment
I grew up in the age of the revisionist Western. And even the entire generation of Westerns that came before that, my beloved Spaghetti Westerns, were themselves a unique take on the pure, American Western. And as I watched 1972’s The Revengers, I realized that I’ve actually seen far more of those kinds of Westerns than I ever have the pure classics. My mind went to a place like this because, in spite of being a late entry in 1972, The Revengers really does feel like a classic Western from a different era.
The Revengers was penned by Wendell Mayes, who was nominated for an Oscar for the Anatomy Of A Murder (1959) screenplay. And after Revengers went on to incredible heights with 1970s mega films, writing both Death Wish and The Towering Inferno. So it would seem that this screenplay here drew more from his classic hollywood past than the definitive 1970s event films of his later career which are still being emulated and remade today.
Director Daniel Mann was also a bit of an old school director, with this film falling in the middle of his career of over 30 directorial credits. His first film came in 1952. Here he adds very little in the way of flourishes or definitive style, but the on location shooting results in beautiful, sweeping vistas even if the movie barely breathes for a moment to let us revel in them.
The story follows John Benedict (William Holden), a peaceful rancher near the Mexican border whose family is slaughtered by a band of Comanches being directed by a white man with one dead white eye. Benedict immediately charts a course for revenge and leaves behind the ranch for a new life as somewhat of an outlaw. He pretends to buy the labor of some prisoners in a Mexican prison and once they are away from jail, he frees them and tells them about his real mission of revenge. A never-stable bond begins to form between the criminals and Benedict, and the rest of the movie bounces all over the place across various adventures and spanning what seems to be years. The fickle and immoral natures of this band of criminals is constantly at play, while Benedict’s thirst for vengeance seemingly washes away the man he used to be. Is there anything Benedict can do to really redeem these conmen friends he has made? And is there any hope for Benedict himself? Or are they all lost to the cycle of violence?
Now, among this rag tag group of outlaws you have a cowardly liar by the name of Hoop, played by none other than Ernest Borgnine. And there’s also Woody Strode playing an American slave who had run to Mexico and who lives by his own code no matter what. It was this cast that pulled me in to checking out this film I’d otherwise never heard of. And they didn’t disappoint. Holden was in his 50s by this production, so it did maybe feel like he was a little bit old for the father of small children his character was supposed to be, but he commands the respect of his rowdy band through being a good and tough man throughout. Hoop is a loveable drunken coward and Borgnine plays it up quite well. Strode’s character Job also seems to have a great dynamic with Benedict, but their relationship never quite gets a full arc, which is hard to do when there are really six men that Benedict hires and I’m only singling out the names I already knew. There’s also a young man who looks up to Benedict as a father figure who does, in fact, have a more complete and well-developed relationship with Benedict that gets fleshed out very satisfactorily. But otherwise many of “The Revengers” suffer from Peter Jackson Dwarf syndrome and simply serve as indistinguishable faces on a team of tough guys.
Humorously, the PR marketing materials for this film implied that it was only one hour and eight minutes long, so I popped it in thinking I was going to bang this viewing out quickly and move on to some other things. But it turns out the film is actually one hundred and eight minutes long, not one hour and eight. I only bring this up because I really watched the film AS a one hour film initially, and assumed that it was all going to wrap up fairly quickly and neatly. When the story took a few sharp turns and didn’t seem to be winding down at the hour mark, I realized the error. But by then I was seeing the film as a really stripped down and straight forward affair. And it is that, even if it does run a more traditional length than I was expecting. While the plot twisted into directions I hadn’t anticipated and explores loyalty and honor and the toxic nature of revenge, the visuals of the film and the delivery of it all is very straightforward and almost workman-like in its simplicity.
The Revengers feels like old Hollywood, with some aging actors playing tough guys perhaps a little past their prime. But it spins its tale with a very old school approach that feels quaint today. Perhaps this is a bit like what an Expendables film might have looked like had one of those been made in 1972. It isn’t essential viewing by any stretch, but Benedict’s winding tale of vengeance will almost certain go in directions you didn’t expect and its explosive final battle scene against a raiding band of Comanches across a field of jerry-rigged dynamite landmines is a pretty spectacular finale. So if Holden, Borgnine, and Strode get you as excited as they do me, and a largely no-frills Western that delivers the goods without a ton of bells and whistles sounds like your thing? Check out The Revengers!
The Package
CBS Home Video is releasing this DVD and it looks pretty fantastic. I don’t ever know a whole lot of the technical details behind how a film is remastered, but I do feel like I can see the difference between a high definition disc and a standard definition one. There probably wasn’t enough demand for this title to warrant a blu-ray release, but this DVD actually does look phenomenal for a standard definition release. The exteriors of the wild west were gorgeous, bright, and colorful.
Besides the film itself you really only get an original trailer for the film which gives you a glimpse of just how great the remastered version of the film looks since the trailer looks like garbage. Oh, and it comes in one of those “environmentally friendly” DVD cases where they just took out a bunch of plastic under the wrap-around jacket design so the whole box feels like it is going to crack in half when you try to pull the DVD off of its spindle. It is always nice when “environmentally friendly” designs like this also help cut the costs of these releases for their distributors.
Anyway, enough snark from me. This is a beautiful standard definition release, even if the package is flimsy. The film is a solid enough entry in the Western genre, even if it is a fairly late in the game traditional Western that came just as a new era of more culturally timely and relevant westerns were on the rise. This release is a proper way to see this largely forgotten entry to the genre.
And I’m Out