To begin with, this is one of the first films I ever recall watching my father having acquired a copy on 16mm when I was still a kid!; needless to say, I've been wanting to re-acquaint myself with it for several years particularly to see how it stacked up against other Spaghetti Westerns which, naturally, I came across much later
and, this, in spite of Leonard Maltin's unflattering rating!
As it turned out, the film lived up to my expectations in being a middle-of-the-road genre effort not one of the best, perhaps, but reasonably entertaining all the same. Incidentally, it forms part of a handful of Spaghetti Westerns with the Mexican Revolution as backdrop; an added attraction to the film, then, is its main plot involving a caper aboard a moving (and heavily-guarded) train it has, in fact, been referred to as a cross between THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960; in view of the select group called upon to aid in a cause) and THE WILD BUNCH (1969; which had a similar robbery as a subplot)!
While the central train sequence involves some notable tension (the elderly dynamite expert loses part of his equipment, the samurai falls off and has to run across a lengthy stretch of fields in order to rejoin his associates), the gang is never shown to be in any serious danger throughout; the final confrontation with the Army, for instance, is nothing at all like the notorious massacre seen in THE WILD BUNCH itself in fact, none of them gets wounded or killed
and even the tension within the outfit over whether they should hand over the gold to the revolutionaries or else keep it for themselves is resolved without so much as a punch (rather it's shrugged off with a laugh!).
The multi-national group is played by Americans Peter Graves (well cast in a basic extension of his signature role in the classic MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE TV series) and James Daly (his presence here isn't displeasing yet quite baffling, as he can't have been at all a familiar name to Italians personally, I only knew him from his brief role in PLANET OF THE APES [1968]!), Japanese Tetsuro Tamba (who's just as anonymous as Daly perhaps the film's budget could afford only one foreign 'star') and, of course, Italians Bud Spencer (a staple of the genre and, thankfully, resorting only very briefly to his trademark comic brawling) and the youthful Nino Castelnuovo (who, naturally, sides with the Revolution all along). The supporting cast includes another genre contribution from Italian starlet Daniela Giordano (as a Mexican peasant girl who shows interest in samurai Tamba): her lovely presence is always welcome and I still recalled the scene here in which the Army General tears off her clothes from all those years ago! but it's not quite as captivating as in the two other films of hers that I've watched; there's also Giacomo Rossi-Stuart who, for an actor of his stature, is given very little screen-time as a lieutenant to the Mexican General.
Having mentioned the surprise casting, one also has to question the decision behind offering the directorial reins to a minor-league American, former actor Taylor; incidentally, years later, when Giordano was asked by a magazine to comment about the film, she couldn't even recall him being on the set and that co-director Zingarelli handled most of the proceedings! Dario Argento was also behind this film as a scriptwriter which makes the film's tameness all the more curious and, given its derivative nature, perhaps shows his ultimate disenchantment with the Spaghetti Western genre
or else he was already thinking of branching out into direction (his debut film, the seminal giallo THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE [1970], was released not long after). THE FIVE MAN ARMY is marked by yet another rousing Ennio Morricone score which is cited by fans as being among his best from this era but, to me, it felt somewhat too similar to his work on Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy!
Finally, I couldn't really determine the running-time of the film since it was interrupted by numerous publicity spots (I watched a VHS recording of a TV broadcast); however, curiously enough, the Italian version is listed as being only 91 minutes long on "Stracult"
whereas the edition prepared for U.S. consumption is 107 minutes!
