Vera Cruz delivers no less a demolishing blow to its genre than Robert Aldrich’s next movie, Kiss Me Deadly. For a liberal, Aldrich used a very special strategy for Kiss Me Deadly. In penetrating the essence of Mickey Spillane’s reactionary world, he responded to the Cold War atmosphere with a savage, cynical stroke of genius. With the equally fantastic Vera Cruz he stripped the humanistic surface from the western, opening vistas for the real renaissance of the genre, showing the way to Leone and Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. His other western milestone, Ulzana’s Raid, was a masterpiece of the 1970s.

Gary Cooper’s character, from the South, is – in the words of Burt Lancaster – “our specialist of causes” (“I don’t trust him. He likes people – you can’t trust”) but words and ideals mean very little in the cynical rondo where both materials and causes are constantly being bargained for. There is a lot of sheer showmanship in terrible killing but the film is not an operetta; it plays for real, with both the denseness of the traditional western and an unexpurgated sense of Mexico, respectfully, as in the films of John Huston and Sam Peckinpah.

It’s also a morbid buddy movie where the whole idea becomes absurd, with undertones of deceit everywhere and idealism as the ultimate joke. Every man is an island and life is just a set of animalistic survival strategies, a continuous state of war where greed is the basic ingredient. Burt Lancaster’s character – never lapsing into cliché – is the final proof.

It’s Lancaster who is now the center of our celebration of a great movie (last year we paid homage to Aldrich’s association with Chaplin): the brilliant star of The Killers, The Sweet Smell of Success, Il gattopardo, The Professionals, Apache, Vera Cruz, Ulzana’s Raid and Twilights Last Gleaming. And soul brothers they were – Lancaster was for Aldrich the single most important actor-collaborator, an incredible combination of sheer physicality and thinking (or plotting), a master mover of ironies with the capacity to have society’s paradoxes move inside him and fill the screen (Aldrich’s fabulous widescreen!), a testimonial to society as an incurable illness. The role of action in Vera Cruz, seemingly so careless, gives way to complexity and a rereading of western mythology in purely monetary terms (avoiding shallowness) – indeed, who before Sergio Leone went that far?

Peter von Bagh