Cinema: Wandering in the Desert

The Reward is a U.S. western from a book written by an Englishman and made by a French director with a Swedish leading man, a French-American heroine, and a number of Mexican actors who deliver at least half the dialogue in Spanish. These exotic ingredients were pressure-cooked on location in the 125° midsummer heat of California's Death Valley, and the result is indigestible.

It looks good, though. Director Serge Bourguignon, 37, who made Sundays and Cybèle, turned himself loose on that old prop, the American desert. His stunning sweep of distance and nuance of color amount to a rediscovery of America, and his smallest scenes and routine closeups are invariably composed with care and elegance. But the action drifts with the unmotivated irrelevance of a dream.

There is Max von Sydow, the moody, beautiful Swede who made his U.S. debut last winter as Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told. Still speaking as though he had just finished the Sermon on the Mount, he plays Scott Swenson, a barnstorming crop duster who crashes his plane in northern Mexico and is held by the police for demolishing a water tower. To raise money, he tells the police captain of an old enemy he has seen a moment ago driving through town with a blonde; this fellow just happens to have a price of $50,000 on his head for a kidnap-killing he may or may not have committed. The police captain (Gilbert Roland), an embittered tough guy suffering from malaria as well as some of the corniest lines ever delivered in Death Valley, sets out in a truck with Von Sydow and three Mexican assistants to hunt down the fugitives (Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Yvette Mimieux) and claim the reward.

Soon they are all allegory-bound on horseback—killing each other, losing their horses and themselves, exchanging long looks. "I have always had it in my mind to do a silent picture," says Director Bourguignon, "and this one is two-thirds silent. The last reel is practically without dialogue."

It is also virtually without the kind of intensity of character that would have made audiences care whether anybody got back to civilization. Except Miss Mimieux. She is so pretty and so puzzled by the whole misadventure, and her pale, pale hair is so nicely combed. As Captain Gilbert Roland declares: "She is the only life in the desert within us. She must not be destroyed."