100 Rifles (1969)

Film: 100 Rifles (1969)

Stars: Jim Brown, Burt Reynolds, Raquel Welch, Fernando Lamas, Dan O'Herlihy

Director: Tom Gries

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Raquel Welch-click here to learn more about Ms. Welch (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In the wake of One Million Years BC, Raquel Welch was a major star, but not in the way the actress wanted to be.  Welch desired to be taken seriously as a performer, but she kept being typecast in roles that traded on her crazy physique & beauty.  She turned down the role of Jennifer in Valley of the Dolls (a part that eventually went to Sharon Tate), but still had success with Bandolero! and Bedazzled.  One of the pictures during this phase of Welch's career was 100 Rifles, a movie that weirdly didn't make a lot of money, so you might be wondering in a month where I only get four "Saturday's" with a star that endured as long as Welch did (she regularly made movies into the late-1970's, and we'll get to two of her films from that decade as we close out the month), why I'd pick such a film.  I'm going to get to that below, but first let's ground ourselves in the movie at-hand.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers on Lyedecker (Brown), a law officer trying to track down Yaqui Joe (Reynolds), a half-white/half-Native American bank robber who has run off with a large sum of money.  Before he can return Joe to justice, both men are trapped by a Mexican General named Verdugo (Lamas).  It is revealed that the bank money is gone, and that Joe used the money to buy 100 rifles for his people, the Yaqui, to stage an uprising against the general.  They are rescued by Sarita (Welch), a Mexican rebellion leader who is trying to enact revenge against the general, who killed her father.  Slowly, Sarita & Lyedecker begin to fall in love (eventually having sex), but in their rebellion against the general, Sarita dies, leaving Lyedecker bereft.  As a result of his new friendship with Joe, though, he lets him stay in Mexico (to take on the leadership role that Sarita had played), and returns to Arizona alone.

100 Rifles is not good.  The film was considered somewhat revolutionary at the time because of the romance between Welch and African-American actor Jim Brown onscreen.  While we had seen at this point interracial relationships in movies (including The World of Susie Wong, which we discussed in October), few had included sex scenes as explicit as Brown's with Welch.  But that's really the only hallmark of this movie that makes it standout.  The film itself is dull-Burt Reynolds is not always a great actor, but he's always entertaining in a movie, and here his natural star power is muted by a heavy-handed script & a repetitive plot.

The movie is most famous to modern audiences, if it's known at all, for a scene where Raquel Welch showers, in a white tee-shirt, and literally stops a train.  It's played for somewhat comic effect (that Welch's measurements are so jaw-dropping they'll literally stop a locomotive in its tracks), but it's an indication of what Welch was up against at the time.  Welch was asked to do a nude scene, but refused, and she was right-Raquel Welch in a wet tee-shirt is more than sufficient to get the point across here.  But it also was one of the reasons that Welch got a reputation from this film for being "difficult," standing up for herself in not wanting to have her body further exploited.  Welch had tense relationships with both of her male leads, and came off of this film, which flopped at the box office, with a diva-reputation, which in many ways would lead to her downfall in the late 1970's.  Like I said, we'll get to that in the remaining two weeks of this season, but I picked 100 Rifles because so much of Welch's reputation among the public-at-large is as a gorgeous prima donna, but at least with 100 Rifles, her behavior was justified; she didn't need to continue to have her body exploited by male directors to underline the story they were asking her to bring to life.