The unoriginal Sean Connery movie Roger Ebert hated: “No sparks are struck”
In 1967, Roger Ebert began writing for the Chicago Sun-Times as the publication’s resident film critic. Within just a few years, he asserted himself as one of America’s most vital critics, even winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for his contributions to his field.
The writer reviewed as many movies as he could get his hands on, from mainstream popcorn flicks to bizarre arthouse titles. No genre was off limits, allowing Ebert to become a well-known and respected voice in the industry. He didn’t mince his words, often using humour to get his opinions across, making his work incredibly readable.
In 1968, he found himself reviewing the newest Sean Connery film, which came in the middle of his tenure as James Bond. As one of the most talked-about British stars of the time, the movie surely excited fans, but unfortunately for Connery, it received rather poor reviews, including two stars from Ebert.
Shalako, also starring Brigitte Bardot, was a European take on the popular American western genre. While it was directed by the American filmmaker Edward Dmytryk, most of the cast was British, although it was shot in Spain.
It was quite the trend at the time for non-American westerns to be churned out, but while the Italian Sergio Leone championed with his spaghetti westerns that decade, many other European takes on the genre, often dubbed ‘roast beef westerns’, were not nearly as successful.
“Considering the resources they brought to their roles, we might have expected more.”
roger ebert
Shalako follows Connery’s titular character as he attempts to save the day after a group of wealthy Europeans go on a hunting trip, which results in conflict between them and the group of Indigenous people living on the land. Ebert compared the film to Hombre but believed that Shalako’s message was much less nuanced: “Hombre showed [Paul] Newman in a ticklish moral dilemma […] Connery’s situation is simpler: He saves a European aristocrat’s hunting party, I guess, simply because he’s after Brigitte Bardot.”
Clearly, Ebert found the narrative of Shalako considerably less interesting, leading him to call it “pretty unoriginal” and claiming that “There’s even a specific twist stolen from Hombre”. The writer added, “Indeed, all problems are solved at the level of action, and Dmytryk avoids the opportunity to develop his characters more deeply.”
For Ebert, this wouldn’t have been so bad if the action sequences were more interesting, but he found them “routine”. Ending his review, Ebert wrote: “Strangely enough, the long-awaited meeting between Connery and Miss Bardot is a flop. They look yearningly at each other a lot, and once he puts his arms around her and they fall out of camera range, but otherwise, no sparks are struck. Considering the resources they brought to their roles, we might have expected more. The same can be said for the movie.”
Shalako was really successful at the box office, considering its lukewarm reception from critics. Evidently, cinema lovers really wanted to see Connery and Bardot grace the screen together, but the result was not nearly as exciting as people had hoped. The movie was a great example of the fact that westerns featuring a predominantly British cast simply didn’t have what it took to succeed in the genre.
