Review for The Professionals

Introduction

My dad loves Westerns. He can’t get enough of them. Westerns and Carry On movies, and you can guess that he inculcated me with his passion from a young age. I quickly outgrew the Carry On movies, but I still love the occasional Western, especially from the Golden Age of Hollywood, when actors like John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Gary Cooper, James Stewart and Burt Lancaster would strap on a shooting iron and defend the lawless West from whatever villain it would need defending from. Growing up, sitting with my dad, watching all of these films, it’s easy to start thinking that I had seen them all. Nothing could be further from the truth. The other week, my dad drew back in disbelief when I told him that I had never seen The Professionals, one of his favourite Westerns. And indeed, I had never seen this film before. A quick Blu-ray purchase quickly remedied that.


Joe Grant is a powerful business magnate who needs a certain calibre of man for a business proposition. Fardan is a former soldier turned arms merchant, Jake is a bounty hunter who is lethal with a bow and arrow, Ehrengard knows horses, and Dolworth can make explosives dance. Grant needs them to cross the border into Mexico, and rescue his wife Maria from the revolutionary Raza. It seems like an easy way to make $10,000 apiece, but Mexico is a dangerous place, both Fardan and Dolworth have history there during the revolution and with Raza personally and it looks like Raza is expecting them. And not everything is as it appears to be.

Picture

The Professionals gets a 2.35:1 widescreen transfer at 1080p resolution. Once again, I have to squee over another gorgeous HD presentation, although I still feel ill-equipped to offer too technical an analysis, simply through not having watched enough in the way of Blu-rays yet. The image is clear throughout, with a decent level of film grain and the odd bit of filmic flicker. The representation of the colours is gorgeous, making the most of the iconic Western cinematography, the long shots, the landscapes, the emphasis on dusty reds, browns and ochre. I guess the limitations are in the source material here, with dark detail lacking, particularly when you have day for night shots, a slight overall softness to the image and the occasional distortion that you get from anamorphic lensing. But skin tones are consistently acceptable, there’s no sign of noise reduction, and detail and texture in the film is palpable.

Sound

You have the choice between Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Surround English, French, and Italian, with subtitles in those languages, as well as Dutch, Arabic, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Hindi, Norwegian, and Swedish. I went with the English as you would expect, and was satisfied with a predominantly front focussed audio track that offered clear dialogue, and adequate reproduction of the music and effects, with just a bit of dimension given to the latter. It’s faithful in that respect to its 1966 roots, and you get what you really need, clear audio, robust without distortion or tinniness. I did notice that there were player generated subtitles for the Spanish dialogue, meaning that you can’t watch this film sans subtitles at all.

Extras

The disc presents its content with an animated menu that loads swiftly enough for a Blu-ray. You also get a decent smattering of extras.

The Professionals “A Classic” lasts 6½ minutes, and offers a critical view of the film.

Burt Lancaster: A Portrait lasts 13 minutes, and is a look at the iconic actor, with input from his biographer Kate Buford, and his daughter Joanna Lancaster among others.


Memories from “The Professionals” lasts 23 minutes, and offers observations on the film from actresses Claudia Cardinale and Marie Gomez, as well as director of photography Conrad Hall. All of these featurettes are taken from a 2003 DVD release of the film, and are presented in SD. There is also some fascinating behind the scenes footage on location for the Professionals in 1966 interspersed with the interviews.

Finally there is a trailer for the 30th Anniversary Edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This last is in HD.

Conclusion

With the reminder that there are very few basic stories which get retold over and over in imaginative ways, it’s easy to see where The Professionals slots in. You have an enemy boasting overwhelming odds, a mission to complete, and a small team of skilled heroes put together to think outside the box, and defeat those overwhelming odds. Whether it’s The Magnificent Seven, or The Dirty Dozen, or The Expendables we’ve seen this particular type of story in several incarnations. That doesn’t make it any less enjoyable on this occasion, and once more it’s not the story itself that determines how the movie performs, but how the story is told, and more importantly, how engaging the characters are. In this respect, The Professionals may be one of the best films of this particular genre.


It’s also a film that just wouldn’t be possible today, as what makes it so good are the stars and the writing, two commodities in short supply in modern Hollywood. The script is efficient and engaging. Each of the characters gets a brief introduction, offering a glimpse of their professionalism in their chosen field, except for Dolworth who gets his larger than life character expounded on, before we get to the recruitment of the characters by Grant, and then it’s straight into the rescue mission.


It’s a team of four that cross the border into Mexico to rescue the beloved wife of Mr Grant, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s really just Dolworth and Fardan, with Ehrengard and Jake in support. But when you have stars like Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster owning every scene that they are in, it’s no surprise that Woody Strode and even Robert Ryan begin to look like supporting cast. Of course Woody Strode’s Jake is a man of few words to begin with, and he instead dominates his scenes with his physicality. Robert Ryan’s Ehrengard has a more important role as the audience proxy. He may be the tough guy who knows horses, but he’s somewhat out of his depth on this mission, especially in comparison to Dolworth and Fardan, who have history together, and communicate more through a shorthand and shared experience than actual words. Ehrengard is there to ask why on our behalf, and as such is an essential role.


Of course it’s Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster who fill each frame with star presence, and you wind up hanging on their every word, watching their every action. Marvin’s restrained menace contrasts magnificently with Lancaster’s extrovert joie de vivre, and the friction and friendship between the two characters is plain to see. Throw in Jack Palance as the villainous kidnapper Jesus Raza, and Claudia Cardinale as the glamorous kidnap victim Maria and the film is overflowing with acting talent and screen presence. Of course you have some great action set pieces and stunts, and dialogue that you can chew on.


I’m still surprised that I’ve missed out on The Professionals for so long. It’s a great action adventure, with delightful characters and a beautifully elegant script. It’s also somewhat rare for a Western in terms of its setting, the early twentieth century when most of the US had become civilised, and it was now revolutionary Mexico that was the new frontier for the action men to make their name in. You get the mix of ‘modern’ technology like the motor car and electricity and machine guns mixed in with horses, pistols and rifles. It’s the last gasp of the frontier era, which itself would presage the last gasp of the golden age of Westerns just a scant few years later. But you can see the seeds of Spaghetti Westerns in films like The Professionals, with their more brutal and multi-shaded take to the characters, shying away from simple white hats and black hats. You can also draw comparisons between this and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dynamite, which would be made just six years later. The Professionals is a great Western that is right at home on Blu-ray, and would be right at home in your collection too.