La Bataille de San Sebastian (1968)
Directed by Henri Verneuil

Film Review

Buoyed up by the colossal success of La Vache et le prisonnier (1959), director Henri Verneuil continued to strike box office gold in France for another two decades, achieving a level of mainstream popularity that no other French filmmaker has ever achieved.  After his two enormously well-received Belmondo collaborations - Cent mille dollars au soleil (1964) and Week-end à Zuydcoote (1964) - Verneuil realised his ambition to make a full-throttle western, in the classical Hollywood mould, with La Bataille de San Sebastian, ably assisted by two big screen icons of the moment, Anthony Quinn and Charles Bronson.

Adapted from the novel A Wall for San Sebastian by William Barnaby Faherty, this unashamed glossy blockbuster was Verneuil's most lavish film, an expensive Franco-American-Italian production that was filmed on the set of John Sturges' 1960 classic The Magnificent Seven (1960).  With Ennio Morricone providing a score that evokes some of his most memorable music (including that for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and some stunning location photography from Armand Thirard, La Bataille de San Sebastian has a visual poetry and exotic grandeur that no other Verneuil film possesses.

Nonetheless, the film has one glaring flaw which neither the critics nor the audiences could overlook: a lacklustre screenplay that lacks both coherence and forward momentum.  There's a terrific climax with a spectacular fight sequence, but it's an agonisingly slow crawl to get there.  Whilst it is far from being Verneuil's most disappointing film, this grandiose homage to the classic American western was something of a flop, failing to attract even a million spectators in France.  The critics loathed it and the French cinema-going public shunned it, and ever since it has languished pretty much in obscurity, massively overshadowed by the stylish modern thrillers that Verneuil went on to make subsequently - Le Clan des Siciliens (1969), Peur sur la ville (1975) and I... comme Icare (1979).

Film Synopsis

In Mexico in the mid-18th century, a bandit named Léon Alastray is on the run from government troops.  Badly wounded, he takes refuge in a Franciscan church, where he is tended to by the kindly Father Joseph.  The latter's refusal to deliver the outlaw to the authorities leads him to be banished to the remote town of San Sebastian.  Alastray willingly accompanies his saviour on this long journey, disguised as a monk.  On reaching the town, both men are surprised to find that it is all but deserted, practically reduced to ruins after a fierce murderous attack by Yaqui indians.

After Father Joseph is shot dead by a marauding Indian, Alastray is mistaken for him by the surviving townsfolk.  He makes an instant enemy in Teclo, an impulsive half-caste who intends murdering him to appease the Indians.  The outlaw is saved by Kinita, a young woman who realises that he is the one and only man who can save the town.  Alastray repays Kinita's blind faith in him by organising the townspeople to erect defences and build a dam to improve the crop irrigation.  These efforts prove to be futile when the Indians launch their next violent assault on the town...