6:30 p.m.	Vera Cruz Robert Aldrich (U.S., 1954)

Adell Aldrich is the daughter of Robert Aldrich and a filmmaker in her own right. Ms. Aldrich began observing her father’s production in the late fifties and went on to collaborate on seven of his films during the sixties and seventies, often as a script supervisor.

When Ben Trane (a stiff but stately Gary Cooper) moseys into town, a dusty way station in 1860s Mexico, his horse is lame from the hard track. We know at once times are tough for this former Confederate officer, now a mercenary looking for a cause with a credit line. He teams up with Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster), a mayhem-mongering gunslinger with a chilling smile. Dragging along a gang of greasy desperadoes (Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, and Charles Bronson), they head for the Gulf Coast as the guardians of Maximillian’s gold. Or so they think. Robert Aldrich’s second western (Apache being the first) cuts loose the simple Manichean joys of the genre, favoring instead a fandango of falsities. Played for high mischief, Lancaster’s amoral merc squeals with delight at the prospect of double-dealing and derring-do, a feral force amongst the tumbleweed. Only Coop clings to a tarnished code in a world of peasant revolts, Gatling guns, and shifting loyalties that leaves the stable door open for Peckinpah’s wilder bunch.

—Steve Seid

• Written by Roland Kibbee, James R. Webb, from a story by Borden Chase. Photographed by Ernest Laszlo. With Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, Denise Darcel, Cesar Romero. (94 mins, Color, 35mm, ’Scope, From MGM)