CommentsXp
Best movie ever!
Afouotos
Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
CrawlerChunky
In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.
Ava-Grace Willis
Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.
ChitoRaffferty
The musical score for this picture was pretty bad. I'm not saying if done right it would have been a difference maker (the film is mediocre). But goodness it sounded like they took samples from every bad TV score in the 50's --I heard it all before-- and tried to do their "Badlanders" score on the cheap. The film was ok. Ladd though clearly in decline did his best with a weak script. Katy Jurado as usual was a strong support presence.
Robert J. Maxwell
You really have to sit down and think things through before you can screw up a film noir classic like John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle" (1949). If you did nothing more than a bad imitation, it would still come out looking pretty good because the original is so superior. So it's hard to botch up an expertly made original film.Yet the screenplay by Richard Collins and the pedestrian direction by Delmer Daves manage to pull off this feat. They've ruined it. They've turned it into a Western, to start with. That's the fate of many other successful dramas, like "Kiss of Death." The acting by poor Alan Ladd was getting soggy by this time in his career. Ernest Borgnine and Katy Jurado aren't bad. Kent Smith is the same agreeable and unexciting actor he was in "The Cat People" fifteen years earlier.But, despite the fisticuffs and whippings and explosions and added romances and the happy ending, it's as if some vampire had crept in from a nearby sound stage and drained everyone of both blood and taste.For anyone who's seen the original, the burglary by a gang of specialists is unforgettably tense and the tension mounts, moment by moment. The crime is shown clearly and in almost complete silence. Here, instead of a complicated technical task performed by carefully selected specialists, the hastily gathered gang simply has to blow a vein of gold out of an abandoned mine. (Boom, and a cloud of dust, masking who's who.) And during this supposedly tense scene, the music pounds, and it sounds like it's from a horror film, not a Western drama, as if that vampire had dragged it along behind him.It's not a lousy movie. It's just not very good. It doesn't seem like an incident out of the Old West. It looks like a perfunctory Western movie.It begins with punishment being dished out in Yuma Territorial Prison in Arizona. The ruins are still there, open to tourists. The plaques inform us that it's been misrepresented in the media, and the visitor gets the impression that it was really a rather nice place, sort of Club Med, serving lobster newburg rather than barbed wire sandwiches, and the corrections officers gave the inmates body rubs after their work out on the tennis courts.
vlbridges-1
For the record, this movie was filmed primarily in Old Tucson, near Tucson, Arizona. Ernest Borgnine and Alan Ladd made a great combo and their friendship, which began in Yuma Teritoral Prison, proved beneficial to both as the story develops. Both had been railroaded and served time in prison in spite of being innocent and both sought and obtained their revenge, albeit in a non-violent manner. Katy Jurado does a good job with her part and the relationship between her and Borgnine is well-written and played. I believe they were husband and wife in "real life." If you love "good guy wins" endings, this is the good old western for you!
alexandre michel liberman (tmwest)
This is one of Delmer Daves' less ambitious westerns, but also one of his best. You would not see Alan Ladd playing more complex characters, like Richard Widmark, Gary Cooper, Glenn Ford or James Stewart, which were in other Daves' westerns. But Daves was able to make the most out of it and Badlanders is an entertaining, fast paced western, about two men who have been cheated out of what belonged to them, and decide to rob a mine. They would get rich and also revenge themselves. Ernest Borgnine and Katy Jurado give the best performances of the film, both play people who have had a terrible life but find hope in each other's arms. Claire Kelly has a small, but significant role, as the mistress of the mine's owner. Badlanders deserves to be released in DVD with widescreen in order to take full advantage of the fact that it was filmed in Cinemascope.
