¡Three Amigos! Blu-ray Review
Play, Very Blu One, Play Like the Wind!
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, November 14, 2011
If Harry Flugleman, the maniacal studio head played by Joe Mantegna in
¡Three Amigos!, had
been the executive in charge, everyone involved would have been thrown into the street. But who
could have expected a flop? Steve Martin and Chevy Chase were big comedy stars at the time,
and Martin Short was familiar from TV. Director John Landis still had comic credibility from
Animal House,
The Blues Brothers, Trading Places and even
Spies Like Us -- and once again he
was working with talented alumni from
Saturday Night Live.
Maybe it was the curse of the Western. As Landis recalls in the
Empire magazine reunion
interview included with the Blu-ray, people warned him not to make a Western, because they
were passé. Lawrence Kasdan told Landis that the same sages warned him not to make
Silverado
(and a few years later they probably told Kevin Costner not to make
Dances with Wolves, Billy
Crystal not to make
City Slickers and Clint Eastwood not to make
Unforgiven). Certainly
audiences coming to see a comic Western from the director of
Animal House were probably
expecting something broad and rude, the kind of parody that Mel Brooks delivered twelve years
earlier in
Blazing Saddles, with cowpokes siting around the campfire farting and Alex Karras
punching a horse unconscious.
¡Three Amigos! was just as silly a film, but in a different way. For starters, the whole notion of
movie star cowboy heroes mistaken for the real thing has a self-conscious, ironic dimension that,
in 1986, was ahead of its time. (As Steve Martin points out, 1999's
Galaxy Quest repeated the
same plot to great success. But
Galaxy Quest was working with an obsessive sci-fi fan culture in
which confusing entertainment with reality was already a running joke.) And the rest of
¡Three
Amigos! takes it cue from that winking, can-you-believe-this premise. The film's villain, El
Guapo, may threaten rape and pillage, and he actually does order the destruction of a town, but
he's chiefly remembered for being vain about his age and quizzing his chief lieutenant about a
"plethora" of piñatas. Like the heros of the title and their adventures, El Guapo is a "bad guy" in
air quotes.
Except for the few early converts who laughed out loud on the first viewing (and you know who
you are),
¡Three Amigos! built its fan base over time, because its jokes are the kind that get
funnier with repetition. Until now, though, the cruelest joke of all was the lack of any decent
version on home video. The DVD released by HBO in 1999 was an embarrassment: non-anamorphic, afflicted by massive gate-weave throughout the
running time, and improperly
mastered so that it abruptly ceased to play during the credits. The new Blu-ray, overseen by
director Landis, immediately becomes the new standard version of
¡Three Amigos!, visually and
sonically, and it also contains new extras that provide valuable information about the film.
In 1916, the peaceful Mexican village of Santa Poco is being terrorized by the dastardly El
Guapo (Alfonso Arrau) and his band of hoodlums. A plucky young woman, Carmen (Patrice
Martinez), accompanied by her brother, Rodrigo (Philip Gordon), seeks help in a nearby town
but finds only more scum like El Guapo. But then Carmen and Rodrigo hear the sound of organ
music from the nearby church and enter to see a silent film being projected. It's the Three
Amigos: Lucky Day (Martin), Dusty Bottoms (Chase) and Ned Nederlander (Short), heroic
defenders of the weak and upholders of justice. Carmen and Rodrigo think they're watching a
newsreel recounting true exploits and immediately telegraph the Three Amgios (c/o Goldsmith
Studios) to ride to their aid.
As it happens, the Amigos need a gig. They've just been fired by studio boss Flugleman
(Mantegna) for demanding more money when their last picture,
Those Darn Amigos, flopped at
the box office. Ejected from the studio mansion, stripped of their clothes (all of which came from
wardrobe), they're standing outside the gates when Carmen's telegram arrives. All they have to
do is steal their costumes from wardrobe and head off to Mexico. (If the costumes remind you of
the 1950s TV series
The Cisco Kid, it's because the Amigos are supposed to be wealthy Spanish
landowners, who fight crime and injustice in their spare time. The rest of the cast in their black-and-white
faux silent movies look no more
Hispanic than Chase, Martin and Short.)
For a while, the Amigos are able to maintain the illusion that they're lethal killers through a case
of mistaken identity. Without realizing it, they cross paths with a German arms dealer (Kai
Wulff) and are mistaken for his associates, even while performing a fey rendition of "My Little
Buttercup". Eventually, though, illusion and reality collide, and the Amigos are unmasked as
actors. "El Guapo only kills
men!" says the brigand, as he sends the weeping trio scurrying for
their lives. Distraught, ashamed and aware that they have nothing to go back to, the trio decides
to do the absurd and be the Three Amigos for real. Like Alan Swann in
My Favorite Year, they'll
save the day -- for real. It may be a little late, since El Guapo has decimated Santa Poco and
kidnapped Carmen, but better late than never.
One of
¡Three Amigos! most subversive running gags is that, from the moment Lucky, Dusty and
Ned commit to being "real" heros, the movie itself promptly gets more artificial. How else to
explain that the villagers' directions to El Guapo's lair involve finding a singing bush (voiced by
Randy Newman -- it's in the credits) and summoning an Invisible Swordsman? What about that
scene where they sleep under the stars against a beautiful but very obviously painted backdrop,
with flat cardboard cactuses, trained and well-behaved animals, singing horses and a talking
tortoise? And let's not forget Lucky's miraculous ability to recover from bullet wounds, Ned's
flying skills, speed-sewing that even a modern factory would envy and the miraculous
appearance in Santa Poco of a large cache of weapons that, if it had been there earlier, would
have rendered outside help a moot point. Indeed, by the time the Amigos ride out of Santa Poco
into a purple sunset, their entire Mexican adventure seems to have been converted into a Harry
Flugleman release, just fast-forwarded a few decades to the age of talkies and technicolor. Which
may be the biggest joke of all.
Landis has always worked best with comedy ensembles, and he coordinated the different styles
of the trio playing the Amigos with a master's skill. (In the accompanying interview, they all
agree that Landis was the one in charge.) All three are playing dumb, but in very specific
versions: Martin's Lucky, the assertive ignoramus who thinks he knows what he's doing when he
hasn't a clue; Chase's Dusty, the narcissistic klutz who doesn't want to be bothered with
anything that requires effort or thought ("You could kiss me on the veranda." "Lips would be
fine."); and Short's Ned, a child star who never grew up and for whom life
is a movie.
Still, the most memorable comic creation may be Alfonso Arau's El Guapo. As much as the
film's plot owes to
The Magnificent Seven (or
its source,
The Seven Samurai), Arau's presence
attests to an additional source,
The Wild Bunch, where Arau played one of the lesser villains and
managed to stand out, even at a tender age, while confronting a stony-faced William Holden. (It's
hard to imagine anyone else saying "please . . . cut the fuse" with quite the same urgency.) As in
The Wild Bunch, the villain is being aided by German armorers, but El Guapo has no political
ambition. He just wants to enjoy being El Guapo, which is how Arau plays him. When you're El
Guapo, life is a piñata of pleasures -- until gringos start falling from the sky.
¡Three Amigos! Blu-ray, Video Quality
With one small reservation, which I'll discuss below, HBO's Blu-ray of
¡Three Amigos! presents
the film as it was meant to be seen and more than makes up for the 1999 DVD travesty. Gone is
the pervasive gate-weave and print damage, and the credits play to the end. The 1080p, AVC-encoded image features strong, saturated colors that
shift as appropriate to portray the scene on
display, whether it's the dusty earth tones of Santa Poco and El Guapo's hideout, the Hollywood
tackiness of the Goldsmith studio, the purplish hues of the sunsets into which the Amigos ride
(several times) or the soundstage technicolor prairie on which the Amigos camp, dining on
barbecued bat (actually bacon). Even the parched desert crossing is colorful without being blown
out by the hot whites of the sand and sun.
Black levels are very good, and they need to be, or the Amigos' costumes wouldn't look right.
Detail is so well delineated that the hideous patterns of the outfits the Amigos wear to their
Flugleman meeting (costumes they inherited from their flop,
Those Darn Amigos) are on full
display. The dirt, grime and bad teeth of El Guapo and his men are also conveyed in suitably
grotesque detail, along with the stitching and spangles on the Amigos' costumes.
My only reservation is one that I hesitate to bring up, because of the likelihood that it will be
taken out of context and magnified to the exclusion of this Blu-ray's virtues (and I'm giving it a
high score). There is almost a complete absence of visible film grain, which is surprising in a
film of this vintage. Every so often -- and we're talking about a handful of shots in the entire
film -- a close-up on one of the Amigos' faces left me with the impression that the texture was a
little too smooth. I'm not talking about a "wax dummy" effect (a phenomenon that I suspect
Landis is all too familiar with, given what Paramount did to his
Trading Places); it's more like
the effect of too much pancake makeup.
We have reached the point in the development of digital tools where it is possible to effectively
eliminate film grain without stripping image detail; a recent impressive example is James
Cameron's
Aliens. However, just because an ability exists doesn't mean it has to be used. The
decision whether or not to eliminate grain is an aesthetic, even a philosophical one. Obviously, it
may also have commercial implications. For whatever combination of reasons, Landis and the
technical staff he was overseeing appear to have made the decision to produce a grainless
¡Three
Amigos!, and they have certainly done it the right way: leaving the full range of picture
information intact and introducing no artifacts that I could detect. Indeed, judged by the standards
of today's digital intermediate world, where grain is frequently non-existent in the final product,
this is a pleasantly film-like image, and it certainly lacks the digital "edge" that has marred Blu-rays such as
Back to the Future.
I've already devoted more words to this issue than a non-problem deserves, but since it caught
my eye, I couldn't say nothing. And since it's a subject that can't be raised without risking battles
over lines in the sand (much like the one Ned draws), I'm taking this opportunity to articulate my
observations
in full before recommending the disc.
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