Here's a strange one and only debatably under our purview here at Friendly Fire.

If the porkchap feed didn't skew so modern and dumb, I'd say it should be in there.

But we're in the main feed and this isn't a dumb movie.

It's a 1964 movie that looks at the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War on the people who fought in it on both sides.

In Spain we have Vignolas, Anthony Quinn's morally turpitude-ness

captain in the guardians of you.

You can tell he's bad because he's cheating on his sickly wife accepting bribes and

wearing that weird Francoist hat. Just over the border in France we have Artegas

Gregory Peck's Rebel with a cause Bandit who is living in exile after the Civil War,

despite the opening scene of the film showing his rejection of exile at the end of the Civil War.

The action kicks off when a little kid named Paco travels from Spain to France to ask Artegas to kill Vignolas. It is further

escalated when Vignolas lays a trap for Artegas by moving Artegas's ailing mother into a hospital as bait

so that he can dry Arteas out into the open.

None of this does much to motivate Artegas, who is spending most of his days drinking his ass off while

wallowing in his own self-pity.

You see, this is 20 years after the Spanish Civil War, so 14 after the end of World War II, and while the forces of fascism have been temporarily quashed in the rest of Europe,

Franco is still the leader of Spain, and Vignolas is still Artegas's Bet Noir in their local village of San Martin.

It takes an entire movie and a lot of convincing and correction of misinformation to convince

our rebel to head behind enemy lines to try to make a last stand against the bad guys.

His first instinct might have been the right one. We're also going to talk a lot about religion here

because Omar Sharif is also in this film playing a

priest and these there to specifically draw a contrast between the self-serving

...