A unique, memorable film that my father took me to see when I was about 6 or 7. I quite enjoyed and was drawn to Glenn Ford as the genial blue-denim-jacketed Sam (Glen Ford) who takes three Brahma bulls to South America for a fee of 20 thousand dollars. He was always smiling and had a kind face and reminded me of the genial grandfather who only visited me occasionally with the first tins of Planter’s cashews I’d ever encountered. Ford’s giving presents to his brother’s kids and giving a stick of gum to the first South American boy he meets reminded me of my grandfather from the get-go.
There were also some disturbing moments and scenes which negatively influenced my young mind: moving boa constrictors and two piranha scenes (one in which a bad guy was tortured). There was also a scene in which the crazy, but likable bandit El Gato (played memorably by Cesar Romero–his best role) apparently shoots off his finger. Let’s just say that some of this stuff would have been handled better by teens of the day than younger kids my age. BTW/My first impressions of snakes and jungles evolved from this occasionally garish movie.
Absolutely nothing is what it appears to be in the movie with respect to the murder of the rancher who was to pay Sam, the stealing of one of the bulls, the killing of another, the abrupt hanging of a farmer, the friendliness and abundant generosity of Hermany (Frank Lovejoy’s best role), and the loyalty of Teresa (sexy, singer-dancer Abbe Lane). A nice exotic musical soundtrack by Lane’s collaborator Xavier Cugat and beautiful scenery round out the low-budget-melodrama of William Castle’s untypically large-budgeted film.
Grace under pressure amidst the confusion and violence of the South American setting is exactly what Glenn Ford personifies as the likable, unflappable Sam–the simple, decent Americano who just wants to mind his own business and take back the 20 thou to his brother back home in the States.
The Americano is definitely a strange artifact from the ’50s era of popular men’s magazines and adventure magazines of the day This exotic ‘cowboy’ movie captures all that kind of romantic, lurid violence and passionate male-female relationships which were once considered politically-correct in the otherwise buttoned-down Eisenhower-grey-flannel-suit years. Strangely enough, though, there are truths and values here that once ‘turned on’ moviegoers, and which appealed to the imagination, passing muster, uncriticized, for general audiences of the mid-1950s.