Robin Hood of El Dorado: A Messy Bit of History

Is it worth your time?

If you have a soft spot for classic, black-and-white Westerns that feel like they were shot on a backlot, then sure. It's not reinventing the wheel, but Warner Baxter carries the thing with a kind of weary grace that’s hard to ignore.

If you need your historical dramas to actually be, you know, accurate or nuanced, you’re going to hate this. It treats the Mexican-American border conflict like a light afternoon skirmish.

The whole thing kicks off with Joaquin being a pretty chill guy, farming his land and loving his wife. Then, the movie takes a hard turn. The murder of his wife is handled so quickly you barely have time to process it before he’s already reaching for his pistol.

It reminds me a little bit of the pacing in The Soul of Youth, where things just sort of happen because the script says so, rather than because people are actually feeling them. The emotional beats don't really breathe.

Odd Little Moments

• There’s a scene where Joaquin is looking at a gold nugget like it’s the most cursed object on earth, and the lighting is just… aggressive.
• Three-Fingered Jack shows up and honestly, he’s the only one having any fun in this whole movie.
• The dialogue is stilted, especially when they try to make the villains sound truly evil. It just comes off as grumpy.

It’s funny, I found myself thinking about The Silver Streak for no reason at all. Maybe it’s just the urge to see a train or a horse go somewhere fast, just to get away from the static conversations.

The movie gets noticeably better when Joaquin stops talking about justice and starts acting like a proper outlaw. The film feels like it’s struggling between wanting to be a gritty revenge story and a romanticized legend. It never really settles on either.

There’s a moment in the second act where the posse is riding, and the camera lingers on the dust for a solid ten seconds too long. I think the editor must have been daydreaming. Or maybe they just really liked the dust.

It’s not a bad movie. It’s just a movie that feels like it’s trying to be five other things at once. Watch it for Baxter, stay for the hats.