To celebrate the late actress’ birthday, we’re looking back at her Wild West adventures.
Raquel Welch, whose birthday we celebrate today, appeared in only three big-screen westerns during her decades-long career. But she rode tall in each of them. Indeed, when she earned her spurs in Bandolero! just two years after her breakthrough performance in Fantastic Voyage (1966), no less a Hollywood veteran than James Stewart was suitably impressed: “I think she’s going to stack up all right,” he predicted of his bold and beautiful costar. He was right.
Bandolero! (1968)
The Pitch: When Mace Bishop (James Stewart) recuses his errant brother Dee (Dean Martin) and the latter’s gang from hanging for a murder committed during a botched bank robbery, they bring along the victim’s Mexican-born widow, Maria (Welch), as a hostage. Complications ensue as they’re pursued by a lawman (George Kennedy) who’s sweet on Maria, and banditos who don’t aim to please.
The Rundown: Welch is credible and creditable throughout this western directed by genre master Andrew V. McLaglen (Shenandoah, McLintock!), especially whenever Maria — defiantly if not downright proudly — reveals details of her checkered pass. “I was a whore at 13,” she says, “and my family of 12 never went hungry.” She was able to marry well, she says, only because her late husband found her working in a cantina and purchased her from her father for “five cows and gun.” In short, Maria is more of a tough cookie than a distressed damsel, so it’s altogether appropriate that she’s the one who blows away the bandito chief during the exciting climactic scenes staged by legendary stunt coordinator (and eventual Smokey and the Bandit director) Hal Needham.
100 Rifles (1969)
The Pitch: Arizona lawman Lyedecker (Jim Brown) crosses the Tex-Mex border in 1912 to arrest roguish Yaqui Joe (Burt Reynolds) for bank robbery, only to get caught in the crossfire between forces led by the sadistic General Verdugo (Fernando Lamas) and downtrodden peasants who bought the weapons of the title with loot from Yaqui Joe’s heist. Welch plays Sarita, a Yaqui Indian revolutionary who knows what boys like.
The Rundown: Welch relies upon a dubious Mexican accent more than she did in Bandolero! — and plays into her sex symbol image much more, most notably when Sarita distracts an entire trainload of Verdugo’s troops by taking a shower under a water tower. (Mind you, she’s not naked — but, well, wet clothes do tend to cling.) Even so, she remains persuasively formidable when push comes to shove, especially during often-violent battle scenes where director Tom Gries (Will Penny, Breakheart Pass) has Sarita shooting just as straight as her male costars. And while she and Brown reportedly did not get along well off-camera during production, you’d never guess that from their steamy close encounter in a lovemaking scene that was borderline scandalous back in the day.
Hannie Caulder (1971)
The Pitch: After she is raped and her husband is killed by three loutish outlaws (Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, Strother Martin), frontierswoman Hannie Caulder prepares to mete out rough justice with training and armaments from a notorious bounty hunter (Robert Culp), a legendary gunsmith (Christopher Lee), and a mysterious man in black (unbilled Stephen Boyd).
The Rundown: It may have opened to mixed reviews and unimpressive box-office numbers, but this spaghetti western-flavored shoot-’em-up from director Burt Kennedy (The War Wagon, Support Your Local Sheriff!) has developed a loyal cult following over the years with its self-assured mashup of revenge melodrama, darkly comical bickering — perfectly cast as squabbling siblings, Borgnine, Elam, and Martin rank among the most cantankerously inept bandits in movie history — and the slow-burning, arrestingly understated student-mentor relationship between Welch as a woman determined to turn herself into a relentless avenger and Culp as the man who worries whether she’s too good a person to be as bad as she wants to be. Quentin Tarantino has claimed that Hannie Caulder in general and Welch’s Hannie in particular were major inspirations for his Kill Bill films. No doubt.
