Budd Boetticher's Wings of the Hawk is just further proof that even great directors could direct duds. Film historians might find the film interesting as it contains a kind of proto-Zapata Western plot:a white miner gets caught up in the Mexican Revolution on 1910-11. When his mine is seized by the evil Colonel Paco Ruiz, Irish Gallager (played by the reliably reliable Van Heflin) falls in with a group of guerrilla revolutionaries led by the beautiful Raquel. This being an eighty minute Hollywood film, the two fall in love and Irish is convinced to help free Mexico from tyranny. The plot is serviceable enough. And to the film's credit, it does a fantastic job making the audience hate the villainous Ruiz, played by George Dolenz. But the film is neutered by incompetent cinematography. It's bad enough that much of the film is shot in day-for-night (including a sequence near the end where the rebels use gasoline to make a gold mine's water system light up in flames whose impact is annihilated due to the cinematography), but many shots are framed clumsily. I remember one particular conversation where a large chunk of the dialogue was filmed with Heflin's back towards the audience. In the hands of a director like John Ford or Stanley Kubrick, such a shot could be used to identify that character's state of mind. But here it's merely shoddy craftsmanship. There was only one shot where I saw the genius of Budd Boetticher shine through: Heflin and a group of rebels are forced to watch from a basement while Ruiz's forces round up and execute a number of local townspeople. The executions are witnessed through a barred street-level window that is held in a static shot that obscures most of the outside action. In a way, it almost seems prophetic of Roman Polanski.
4/10
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