El Condor: We'll Do Anything for Some Booty

Jaroo chasing the right kind of booty.

Serving up a gargantuan portion of sex, nudity, and bloodshed, El Condor contains the perfect combination of ingredients for a fine film. But when the theme that it is noble to risk one’s life for love is introduced, the film becomes unpalatable and no longer appeals to even the most naive viewer.

Luke is an escaped convict who joins forces with Jaroo, a fortune seeker, and a band of Apaches. This unlikely team attempts to penetrate a fortress guarded by the Mexican army and a commandant named Chavez.

But the commandant’s mistress, Claudine, and Luke fall in love. This leads to the climax of the film in which Luke duels the commandant for the hand of Claudine. When Luke falls madly in love with Claudine he loses all credibility, believability, respectability, and likeability. The screenwriter’s desperate attempt to create a story which appeals to sensibilities of women ruins an otherwise commendable gore-fest. It is unfortunate for until this point, we liked Luke. Although he is insatiably greedy, this is understandable, human, and within the realm of normal human desire. When Luke falls in love with Claudine we feel that Luke has, in a sense, died.

Luke and Jaroo generally display such carelessness and lack of foresight that they make Mel Gibson look like chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov. But before losing his mind, Luke is the voice of reason. His rationality, albeit meager, tempers Jaroo’s negligence. When Jaroo bargains with Chavez for a small wagon-load of gold, Luke insists on returning the gold. He argues that they should not settle for anything less than all of the gold in the fort.

If we knew of Luke's irrational
feelings for Claudine, we would
have wanted him to give up here. 

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes a group of soldiers rape female villagers. Luke, Jaroo, and the Apaches murder the soldiers while they lay in bed. The women serve as a distraction, creating an opportunity for the men to ambush the soldiers. I am certain that every female who has seen this film believed that the men killed the soldiers to avenge the rapes. However, in truth, the women were only utilized as instruments to attack the soldiers and take their uniforms, by which to gain entry to the fortress. The screenwriter wrote this scene with the aim of purposely misleading female viewers. It is a deft maneuver of script writing. While female viewers are led to believe the men kill the soldiers with noble intent, the rest of the audience remains conscious of reality as it unfolds before our eyes.

In the most artistically compelling scene of the movie, Claudine strips in front of the entire Mexican army. Her striptease distracts the soldiers while Luke, Jaroo, and the Apaches sneak into the fort and ambush them. Claudine performs her striptease for Luke’s benefit, and this gives us hope. We hope that Luke is merely using Claudine as a means to satisfy his greed and attain the gold. However our hope turns to utter disappointment and disillusionment as we realize that Luke is indeed in love with Claudine.

The final battle between Luke and the commandant is completely contrived and ineffective. We are now rooting for the commandant rather than Luke. We wish Luke died earlier, when he was still likeable, before he became insane and believed himself to be in love. Due to the ludicrous nature of the scene, it’s hard to understand how the actors were not rendered helpless by fits of laughter. But the fact that they retained their composure during this preposterous scene is a testament to their mastery of the craft of acting.

El Condor possesses all of the elements that make a Western great but in its theme it fails miserably. The foolish risks taken by Luke and Jaroo for a few crumbs of gold suddenly seem reasonable when compared to the final duel, when Luke risks his life for nothing.