The Professionals

Actually, The Professionals is more similar to the Gary Cooper film Garden of Evil (Henry Hathaway, 1954) in which three Americanos find themselves at loose ends in a small Mexican port town and are retained, along with a local Mexican, by Susan Hayward to retrieve her husband, who is holed up under siege by Indians. Richard Brooks switched the genders of the rescuer and the rescued and changed the setting to the Mexican Revolution period, which allowed him to make the two main characters former soldiers for Pancho Villa. Just like Rick in Casablanca, they supported the right cause in an earlier time, seem to have become cynics, but revert to their ideals at the end. Some of the ideas and themes in The Professionals were used by Sergio Leone in Duck, You Sucker! (aka A Fistful of Dynamite, 1971).

"Ostensibly similar" indeed. Both films have rugged action, take place largely below the Rio Grande, and have Robert Ryan in the cast. That's about the similarity. The director/writer's outlook, the situations, and the climactic action are all sharply different. Peckinpah's film is a brutal, bleak vision of bandits persevering in a world that is closing in on them, a world that they repudiate the only way that the know how, with gunfire in a final, consuming eruption of violence. The professionals of the title of Richard Brooks's film are not outlaws, but knockabouts and mercenaries who happen into what seems to be a job with a big payoff. In the end their sense of honor overrides their cynicism and they lose their payoff, but walk off with their bodies and souls intact. Brooks offers a more conventional Hollywood ending, with the baddish guys showing themselves to be good guys after all, while Peckinpah doesn't give an inch to conventional sentiments and his bad guys choose a nihilistic frenzy as their climax. Only the old man of the gang and the former comrade-turned-pursuer are left to scratch along in a West that has less and less room for their wild ways. Brooks is ultimately affirming of a certain integrity even in mavericks; Peckinpah's guys will live on their anomic terms or die, along with anyone else they don't care for.