ذهب ماكينا

If you take away Peck and Savalas there is not much less, oh yes, Feliciano. In this magnificent landscape Mr. director should make a better movie. Even Omar Sharif is not convincing. It's a pity, so much magnificent actors and such a bad movie. There is not enough tempo, too much senseless talking, unconvincing dialogs and too much boring people. The Indians are unnatural and so both female actors too. Mostly I enjoyed the scenery and the colors. Also the music is great, but it's not enough for the better impression. The movie was made in the year 1969 when spaghetti westerns were on march and the directors should learn something out of them.

How can a western with Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif, Telly Savalas, Eli Wallach, Lee J. Cobb and Edward G. Robinson be mediocre? Well, it can. This could have been a classic treasure hunt: action, adventure, growing paranoia, shifting factions... instead, it's a waste. The big cast is handled terribly. We are introduced to this huge group of people, played by famous stars and respectable character actors; we get some half-baked character-building scenes... then, after a few minutes, 90% of them get killed. The quote from a much better western I've put in the review title feels quite fitting. Try to imagine a version of, say, The Magnificent Seven or The Dirty Dozen... where most group members die in the scene right after their introduction. "Anticlimactic" doesn't quite convey it. Peck is not at his top form: he looks uninterested, even bored. Sharif goes for an over-the-top approach as the outlaw. Worth mentioning is a bit near the end which just cracks me up - movie villain stupidity at its most glorious. Sharif's Colorado has all the gold and the horses, he can ride away and live happily ever after... but he grabs an axe and goes free-climbing after Mackenna, who is far away on the top of a mountain. It's so dumb it's brilliant. There are a few effective scenes - like the arrival at the valley and the gold fever - but, overall, Mackenna's Gold is sadly mediocre. I dig the main theme of the score, though - catchy. 5/10

Who can blame Omar Sharif for chewing up the scenery as the larger-than-life bandito Colorado? Someone has to appear interesting in the movie. This is unnecessarily violent and altogether stupid shoot-em-up with an impossibly stiff-lipped Gregory Peck in the lead. Ted (Lurch) Cassidy and ever-statuesque Julie ("Catwoman") Newmar get to ham it up as "menacing" minstrel-show Indians. Telly Savalas steals every scene he's in as greed and lust personified. Keenan Wynn looks like he'd be happy enough to collect his paycheck and go home. The stupid script makes no sense whatsoever, and the subtle-as-a-crutch allegory at the end is completely out of place. Avoid this mess! 1/10.

Gregory Peck is Mackenna, a one-time gambler who's settled down as the Marshall in a small desert town. Rumors of a lost Apache valley full of gold causes a mass rush that catches both the best and worst elements of the town up in its force. His nemesis Colorado (Omar Sharif) is the chief ringleader, responsible for kidnapping the local judge's daughter (Camilla Sparv) and Mackenna after Mackenna destroys the only map to the valley. By far the strangest thing about this movie is the way that so many great character actors are basically wasted in tiny roles. I see no reason for the townspeople, who only play in one scene, to be performed by actors of the caliber of Lee J. Cobb, Burgess Meredith, Ray Massey, Eli Wallach, and Edward G. Robinson. It seems to me like a gimmick, a trick to make the audience think that the film will be full of great stars when in actual fact they only paid them for what looks like a couple days' work. The big roles in the film go to incompetent performers like Sparv, or to the stale theatrics of a born TV actor like Savalas (who looks incredibly odd and uncomfortable with his tiny fat legs perched on a huge stallion). Only the excellent Sharif is able to do anything really memorable or interesting with his character, and that's a bit of a stretch since the character himself is so typical. Peck is fine, but that's about it. He has none of the fire or passion that fueled his best western performance in "Duel in the Sun" here. Poor Julie Newmar is stuck as a mute with brown makeup on as an evil Apache woman. Another odd thing about the movie is the way it consciously evokes Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia", a far better film. The landscape shots are fantastic, but the shots of Sharif riding through the desert ring a note of deja vu. And it can't be a coincidence that Anthony Quayle shows up in the movie. I half expected Peter O'toole or Alec Guinness to make a cameo towards the end. There's nothing horribly wrong with the film or bad about it as simple entertainment. But considering the cast assembled and the money that was spent, it's very underwhelming. The story is rather dull and predictable, the direction is bland and impersonal. This is simply functional western film-making of the kind that killed the genre.

In 1874 Arizona, a marshal is bushwhacked by an elderly Apache Indian chief carrying a treasure map detailing the whereabouts of a hidden valley of gold; upon the chief's demise, the marshal (who has memorized the map and destroyed it) becomes the prisoner/reluctant ally of a bloodthirsty outlaw and his men who want the gold all for themselves. Trimmed by Columbia Pictures before its release from a three-hour length down to just over two hours, "Mackenna's Gold" features a simple-minded narration by Victor Jory--ostensibly to fill us in on the bothersome story details--but the filmmakers needn't have gone to so much trouble, because their picture is a catastrophe anyway. The Super Panavision 70 vistas are breathtaking to behold (as are the roller-coaster point-of-view shots from the galloping horses), but the intermingled studio footage is an eyesore by comparison, and the film has some of the choppiest editing I've ever seen in a major motion picture. Worse, the strong cast of supporting players are mostly used for target practice, allowing maniacal killer Omar Sharif to practically own the film's entire second-half. Sharif is game but he isn't convincing, and his character Colorado falls prey to some glaring gaps of logic in Carl Foreman's messy screenplay. As the stalwart marshal, Gregory Peck looks understandably sheepish--not even two attractive females in the group rouse his excitement. The finale is a jaw-dropping display of effects, noise, and brutality, and it makes no more sense than the rest of the picture, yet interest is sustained (incredibly) and one is apt to feel they have witnessed something here. Something most definitely wrong-headed, but peculiarly intriguing nonetheless. ** from ****

This movie is one of the greatest films ever made. Don't look on it as a typical western. It just happens to be set in a western setting. This movie is centered around GREED. The character interaction between MacKenn a(Peck) and Colorado (Sharif) is classic. If you want a very enjoyable evening this is definitely a winner.

Everything about this disaster reminds us of the battle that raged in those days between TeeVee and movies, meaning movies exhibited in a theater. The battle was hot and heavy with a major industry severely threatened. Now of course it is both TeeVee and theaters that are running scared. Movies had scope, bigness, grand music, stars and budgets that TeeVee didn't have, so studios made movies that spoke to those values. In this case we have 70mm wide screen, the actual demolition of an impressive canyon as if it had been created for this one event. We have nudity (!), and there's a parade of big names from both TeeVee and Hollywood. The original scope was 2 1/2 hours with an intermission after the townspeople get massacred. But everything about this is wrong. Everything. In part it was because they started with components and shoved them together without any coherent tone: a hee-haw narrator, a comically toned score, what looks like the goals of three or four scriptwriters and in the end some radical chopping of scenes. But there are other problems too. Peck is supposed to be an ordinary character, modeled after "Maverick," the character in the runaway Warner TeeVee western. A man with a rogue past, many women, drinking, gambling, who has turned "good" and cleaned up the town, perhaps heavy-handedly. He encounters one of his lovers, here a sexy Indian maiden who he has not only thrown over, but disfigured. He is played by Gregory Peck, but because the director is so weak, Peck reverts to his Mockingbird lawyer. It screws the whole thing around. Lucas and Harrison Ford were one of the bad things to happen to the world, but you have to admit they got this center right. Egyptian Sharif as a Mexican bandito is similarly bungled. Everything else is sullied in the same way: We have some actors that have been adequate elsewhere, but here we see Lurch, Cat-woman, Kojac, the wife of the studio boss and a bunch of cameos from movie-land. Here, movie-land is shoveled in as "The Town." All the Hollywood actors are townspeople (who are killed by the audience/cavalry) contrasted to the TeeVee folks passing through. The explosions that bring the walls of the canyon down are compromised by some of the cheapest, junkiest effects you'll see. The wonderful location shots are interspersed by artless backprojection. The nudity is by Julie Newmar or her double and consists of a very strangely assembled * swim during which she tries to seduce Peck, is rebuffed, so she tries to drown the apparent new girlfriend in underwater shots made murky in postproduction. Its a curious piece of history. In lots of other places we have movies poorly assembled from prefabricated parts, some which spend a lot of money. Its the overt role that TeeVee plays that makes this interesting, plus the obvious self-reference of goldseekers that come away empty-handed and in the process destroy something beautiful. So much of life is dealing with old battlefields. Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

For all fans of the genre, this should have been the Western epic's last hurrah. All the ingredients are right - Gregory Peck, Carl Foreman, score by Dimitri Tiomkin, vocals from Jose Feliciano, veteran Hollywood stars like Edward G Robinson and Raymond Massey, spectacular scenery, marauding Indians, lost gold, and a * Julie Newmar. Instead we get a chaotic shambles, with wooden acting, dire script, ridiculous characterisation,uneven editing, preposterous storyline, crude special effects and scientific impossibilities (shadows lengthening when the sun rises). What can we salvage from this? Gregory Peck as always provides gravitas, although the poor man must have wondered why he signed on the dotted line. The scenery certainly is wonderful, and Dimitri Tiomkin delivers as always. But the rest of the film crumbles in a heap, rather like the climactic earthquake.

Its got everything! Two fisted action! Gorgeous females! Catfights! Gregory Peck! Camilla Sparve! a Whos Who of yesterdays character actors! Hokey dialog! Excellent Special Effects! Great scenery! Ultra-Panavision™! Directed by the guy who did Bridge Over River Kwai! ah well, according to several sources this movie was supposed to be over 3 hours long, and was going to come out as a Cinerama-type Road Show...but the days of that were dying and Columbia got cold feet, so it was cut to a little over 2 hours; There are some minor differences between 35 and 70mm prints; This movie is a hoot-see it!

This is one of the major movies of 1969 . It is a marvelously rambling frontier fable packed with extraordinary incidents, amazing encounters , nasty characters and virtuous rewards . It follows a sheriff (Gregory Peck) and a group of ambitious men (formed by all star cast : Omar Shariff , Elli Wallach, Lee J. Cobb, Edward G. Robinson, Raymond Massey, Keenan Wynn and many others) in search for gold in a big lost canyon and being pursued by soldiers(Telly Savalas) and Indians. This is an overwhelming Matinée Western plenty of intrigue, double-crosses, gold-lust clichés, adventures and action-packed especially in its final part ; ending in an abrupt, ironic denouement. The film is an exciting story though disjointed and with numerous loose ends ; it is originally written by Carl Foreman and based on the novel by Will Henry. Some ridiculous especial effects such as the bridge scenes at the beginning and abundant matte paintings. Furthermore, contains excessive use of absurd transparency. Packs a colorful and glimmer cinematography in Panavision , shot at Monument Valley from Arizona and Utah. Moving and stirring musical score by Quincy Jones with today classic songs by Jose Feliciano. The film is lavishly produced by Carl Foreman who formerly produced some excellent movies . The motion picture is regularly directed by J.L. Thompson (1914-2002) during his splendorous and successful time in the 60s, when he directed ¨Cape fear¨, ¨Taras Bulba¨ and ¨Guns of Navarone¨; though in his last period he only directed Charles Bronson vehicles, such as ¨Death wish 4¨, ¨Kinjite¨, ¨St. Ives¨,¨Messenger of Death¨, among others. This delicious embarrassing movie will appeal to Gregory Peck devotees. Rating : 6'5 , acceptable and passable.