General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Bandolero!

Bandolero! is a 1968 American Western directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and produced by Twentieth Century-Fox, starring James Stewart as Mace Bishop, Dean Martin as his outlaw brother Dee, Raquel Welch as the hostage Maria Stoner, and George Kennedy as the pursuing Sheriff July Johnson.¹ Written by James Lee Barrett from a story by Stanley L. Hough, the film follows a bank robbery in Texas, a gallows rescue, and a chase into Mexican bandit territory.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	June 1968 by Twentieth Century-Fox; Dallas premiere 18 Jun 1968 at the Majestic Theatre, Los Angeles opening 3 Jul 1968, New York opening 17 Jul 1968¹
Running time / format	106 minutes; Panavision widescreen, De Luxe color, Westrex sound¹
Principal cast	James Stewart (Mace Bishop), Dean Martin (Dee Bishop), Raquel Welch (Maria Stoner), George Kennedy (Sheriff July Johnson)³
Key crew	Director Andrew V. McLaglen; screenplay James Lee Barrett; story Stanley L. Hough; music Jerry Goldsmith; cinematography William H. Clothier¹
Production dates	2 October to early or mid December 1967, in Arizona and Brackettville, Texas¹
Box office	Domestic gross of $12,000,000 per The Numbers; an 8 Jan 1969 Variety chart ranked it the eighteenth-highest earner of 1968 with $5.5 million in film rentals⁴^•¹
Setting	Val Verde, Texas, in 1867, and bandit-held territory across the Mexican border⁵

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in Val Verde, Texas, in 1867.⁵ A band of outlaws led by Dee Bishop, a former Confederate soldier, kills a wealthy rancher during an attempted robbery of a Texas bank. Sheriff Johnson arrests the gang, and the five men are tried and sentenced to hang. Dee's older brother Mace disguises himself as the hangman and stages a last-minute rescue, robbing the bank the gang had failed to breach before fleeing across the Mexican border with the murdered rancher's widow, Maria Stoner, taken as a hostage.¹

Sheriff Johnson, his deputy Roscoe Bookbinder, and a posse pursue the fugitives. The gang fractures into factions, with Mace, Dee, and Maria on one side and Pop Chaney and his son Joe on the other. Dee falls in love with Maria and considers founding a homestead in Montana, but the arrival of Johnson foils the plan. When bandoleros attack, Johnson is forced to release the men he has captured; in the ensuing slaughter, Dee and Mace are both killed by the bandolero leader Angel Muñoz, whom Maria then guns down.¹

The opening sequence, in which Stewart's character waylays a real hangman at a bathhouse and extracts a lecture on the trade before appearing in the man's top hat and frock coat, was singled out by reviewers. Time described the hangman ruse as the film's central joke, while Roger Ebert, then the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, called Stewart's wry scenes as a phony hangman the picture's chief distinction.⁶^•⁷

Production

The project was announced in the 20 June 1967 Daily Variety as a "David Weisbart production," with James Lee Barrett working on a screenplay based on Stanley L. Hough's short story "Mace," the project's original title. A 22 June 1967 item named Robert L. Jacks as producer, and on 28 July 1967 Daily Variety announced the new title, Bandolero!¹ Barrett's final screenplay, dated 18 September 1967 with revisions of 26 September 1967, runs 153 pages and is held in the Barrett collection at Baylor University.²

Principal photography began in Arizona on 2 October 1967, with additional location shooting in Brackettville, Texas, and filming concluded by mid-December 1967.¹ Significant location work took place at the film set built in the 1950s by J.T. "Happy" Shahan for John Wayne's The Alamo (1960); parts of the San Antonio de Bexar set were redressed as the town of Val Verde, and the Alamo itself doubled as the Mexican village of Sabinas for the climax.⁸^•⁹ Other locations included Glen Canyon and Lee's Ferry in Arizona and Utah, and interiors were filmed at the Fox studios.¹⁰^•⁹

Raquel Welch, in her first Western, recalled the shoot as a constrained, cliquish production dominated by what she described as "the old John Ford gang," and said she felt lonely throughout; Stewart and Martin took her to dinner to loosen her up.⁹^•¹¹ The stunt performer and later director Hal Needham was listed as a cast member in the 25 November 1967 Los Angeles Times.¹

Release and reception

The premiere was first planned for April 1968 at the HemisFair world exposition in San Antonio, then rescheduled; the gala took place at the Majestic Theatre in Dallas on 18 June 1968, with a television special simulcast that night on CBS and ABC affiliates throughout Texas.¹ A paperback novelization appeared in July 1968, and a soundtrack album of Jerry Goldsmith's score, conducted by Lionel Newman, was released by Project 3 Records.¹

Critical reception was tepid.¹ A.H. Weiler in The New York Times wrote that Stewart and Martin "suffer more from lackluster efforts to make this Western adult than from the gunfire that finally fells them," and Variety called the film "a dull western meller" that suffered from "distended scripting, routine direction and overlength."¹² Ebert found the story routine but praised the gallery of character actors, including Denver Pyle, Will Geer, Harry Carey Jr., and Clint Ritchie.⁷

Commercially the film did well. The Numbers records a domestic gross of $12,000,000, all of it domestic.⁴ Jeff Arnold's West reports $11 million at the box office against a $4.4 million budget, outgrossing the Western Hang 'Em High ($6.8 million) that year; a behind-the-scenes account places the studio-booked cost at $5 million.¹²^•⁹ Variety's 8 January 1969 chart listed it as the eighteenth-highest earner of 1968, with cumulative film rentals of $5.5 million to that time.¹

Place in the late-1960s Western

Bandolero! appeared at a turning point for the genre. The DVD Talk critic Stuart Galbraith IV describes it as a mainstream studio Western that mixed traditional and revisionist elements, released as Spaghetti Westerns rose in prominence and as the end of the Production Code opened the way for more violent revisionist Westerns such as Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969).¹³ The Numbers classifies it as a revisionist Western set in the 1860s.⁴

The film was the last of three Westerns McLaglen made with Stewart, after Shenandoah and The Rare Breed.¹⁴ A retrospective assessment in Film Freak Central calls the picture a border film that was "the basis in many ways for Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove"; the character names support the connection, since George Kennedy's sheriff is July Johnson and Andrew Prine plays his deputy Roscoe, names that reappear in McMurtry's novel two decades later.¹⁴^•¹² Paul Varner's Historical Dictionary of Westerns in Cinema credits the film's scenery and Goldsmith's score, and reads it as a 1960s Western signaling cultural change.¹⁵ Later assessments have been mixed: a Looper ranking of Stewart's Westerns placed it second-worst, citing the film's treatment of its female characters, while the same film carries a 6.5 user rating on JustWatch.¹⁶^•¹⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns before 1980 › Released 1961 to 1979

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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