The Professionals

Richard Brooks's western, and one of the best-assembled mission films in the genre. A wealthy American landowner hires four specialists: his wife has been taken by the Mexican revolutionary Raza and he wants her brought back. The team has an explosives man, a horse handler, a tracker and a marksman. They cross the border into the desert. What the film manages is to carry the completion of the mission and the question of whether the mission is right at the same time. The Mexican revolution is not background; two of the men once fought inside it, and the man they are going after was their comrade. Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan and Woody Strode make up the team, with Claudia Cardinale as the woman and Jack Palance as Raza. Conrad Hall shot it, and the desert, the rock and the dust are used as a character. Hall was Oscar-nominated for it; Brooks was nominated for direction and screenplay. Near the top of the genre for anyone who loves classical westerns. Treating the woman as an object for most of its length is its open flaw.