Another of the movies that I had on my DVR that I wanted to watch before it expired was one that, unknown to me at the time, is a spaghetti western: The Five Man Army. At the time I recorded it, I only noticed the name of Peter Graves in the screen guide description, but when you watch the opening credits and several of the Italian names show up, it's fairly obviously a spaghetti western.
As I metioned, Peter Graves is the nominal star here, although he's not the first one we see. In a Mexican village in 1914 during the revolution, Luis Dominguez (Nino Castelnuovo) shows up where the authorities are registering men for work permits. Luis has a past, as we later learn, as a bank robber, and so as not to be found out, he takes another man's identity. Luis is then offered a job by a "Dutchman" (Peter Graves).
That job is a heist which is going to require a team of people with various abilities, so in fitting with the formula of a heist movie, we get a series of scenes of the Dutchman finding the right people for the job, all of whom are known to him while they don't know each other. Mesito (Bud Spencer) is a mountain of a man who rustled a rail car of cattle, only to make the mistake of trying to sell them back to their original owner. Mesito also thinks a lot about food, a sort of running joke throughout the movie. There's also the Dutchman's old comrade-in-arms Augustus (James Daly), who is needed because he's the explosives expert. Finally, there's the mysterious "Samurai" (Tetsuro Tamba), who somehow wound up in the US and is good with knives. I don't know if the producers thought Tamba's English wasn't good enough, but there's a conceit written into the script that Samurai is a taciturn man who only speaks when he needs to, and I don't think Samurai has an actual speaking line in the entire movie.
After the five men get together and escape the Mexican authorities again, they learn what the mission is for which Dutchman has assembled them. There's that revolution going on, and the revolutionaries need money. The legitimate Mexican government is shipping a bunch of gold by rail, so as always, why not hijack one of these rail shipments and give the gold to the revolutionaries? Each of them has separately been promised good pay for the work.
Now, the train has a whole bunch of soldiers guarding it, both on open cars and in the one sealed car that actually has the gold. Samurai is good at throwing knives to kill people silently; while Augustus has the explosives knowledge necessary to get into the car with the gold. And Mesito has a key role not on the train. The plan is to unhook that car and shunt it to an abandoned barn; Mesito has to lay a bit of track and operate the switch. And Dominguez, who was in a circus acrobat act before his parents' deaths broke up the act and forced him into a life of crime to make ends meet, is going to rehook the other cars together.
As often happens in heist movies, there are things in the buildup and execution of the heist that threaten to derail it, pun intended. And, of course, even if the heist does go off as planned, it's not unexpected that criminals might wish to get greedy over how much they're going to get paid for it. So with all that, it's not really as though The Five Man Army is breaking any new ground. And yet the road it takes is more than entertaining enough. It's not the world's greatest movie, in part because there's something about the spaghetti western genre's production values that always seems just a bit off. Also, in part because of the cinematography that screams late 1960s with its pans and zooms. But there's more in The Five Man Army that works than doesn't.
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