The Professionals
Short description
Set in Mexico in 1917, during the revolution, The Professionals follows a wealthy Texas rancher and landowner named Joe Grant who hires a small team of specialists to cross the border and bring back his wife, Maria, who has been taken by the Mexican revolutionary leader Jesus Raza. The group is led by Fardan, with Dolworth, Ehrengard and Jake filling out the four-man outfit, and two of them have crossed paths with Raza before. What begins as a straightforward paid rescue turns complicated once the men reach their target and find that the situation is not what their employer led them to believe.
Richard Brooks directed, produced and wrote the screenplay, adapting Frank O'Rourke's novel A Mule for the Marquise. It sits seventh in the run of features he directed, between Lord Jim and In Cold Blood. Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan and Woody Strode play the four adventurers, with Jack Palance as Raza and Claudia Cardinale as Maria; twenty-five performers are credited in all.
The film drew a critics' rating of 7.8 out of 10 from nineteen reviews, ahead of its audience scores of 7.3 on IMDb from around twenty-one thousand votes and 7.1 on TMDB from several hundred. That gap suggests reviewers responded to it more warmly than general viewers did, though both groups rate it favourably. It runs 117 minutes.
What's left behind the scenes
- With the exception of Lee Marvin (1924-1987), who was 42 at the time of filming, the other actors in the leading male roles were over 50, but they all insisted on performing the stunts themselves. However, only Woody Strode (1914-1994) managed to do so, as the studio could not find Black stunt performers of a similar build.
- During the filming of the scene where Maria tries to escape through the canyon, Claudia Cardinale's stunt double was seriously injured in an explosion. The actress, who had never ridden a horse before, had to perform the stunt herself.
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