Find out how director Richard Fleischer found himself forced to shoot the western with Robert Mitchum broadcast tonight on Arte.
Bandido Caballero is Robert Mitchum’s first production, and his second collaboration with director Richard Fleischer, who had completely “reshooted” (returned after its principal shooting) the film Finished laughing.
In its early stages of development, Bandido Caballero is still called Horse Opera. Fleischer is enthused by the story, that of a Mexican soldier of fortune freeing a film crew from the hands of Pancho Villa and fleeing with them to Hollywood while falling in love with the troupe’s young premiere and accidentally becoming a movie star.
When he signs on to do the project, he rejoices in advance, as he confides in his memoirs, Just tell me when to cry :
All the conditions were met: Jacks [le producteur] was a nice guy, Mitchum was hilarious, the story was a lighthearted, satirical adventure, and it was all going to be set in a romantic, scenic Mexico.
This good story must be turned into a screenplay by Earl Felton, and he has time to write since Fleischer leaves to film The Girl on the Swing. On his return, however, Felton only wrote “just under half” of Horse Opera and he finally decided to go for a very classic adventure / western film, omitting Pancho Villa and any link with Hollywood.
United Artists
Robert Mitchum against Gilbert Roland
From then on, the project got off to a bad start, no longer resembled what he had originally accepted, and Fleischer tried to get rid of it. He warns Jacks, his producer, who notifies the studio, United Artists. The filmmaker remembers that everything then became complicated for him:
“When a star is involved [ici Robert Mitchum, NdlR] and the director leaves because he hates the script, everyone becomes hysterical. They are afraid that the star is likely to be scared off and drop the project too.”
(…) But I had [signé] a contract and they had me. ‘Leave us and it’s the trial, my boy’. I could have walked away and maybe won the case. But if I had lost? At this point in my career, I really didn’t need a trial. So I stayed, and asked for the script to be rewritten.
Except that Mitchum has other commitments and filming must begin in six weeks. It’s the panic : “There was not enough time to take the original idea and write a script from scratch”recalls Fleischer. “We had to start from the existing script trying to make sense of it.”
United Artists
Eventually, Horse Opera becomes Bandido Caballero and tells how Wilson, an arms dealer, offers to do business with the Mexican regular army fighting against the rebels. To find weapons for them, Wilson plans to steal his shipment of weapons from a certain Kennedy.
Fleischer made up for bad luck with a good heart by taking a lot of pleasure in filming in Mexico and delivered a very pleasant film, which would be a great success when it was released in 1956.