Mexico

Mexico is both a setting within the western Cannon for Cordoba and a real filming location in Rick Dalton’s career. The country links a professional opportunity shaped by casting compromises to friendships and routines that extended beyond the screen, including Dalton’s later attempt to bring his drinking under greater control.

Mexico in Cannon for Cordoba

The film’s story sends a team into Mexico to confront Córdoba, a Mexican bandit posing as a revolutionary. His force numbers one hundred men and includes six cannons stolen from the United States military. The mission is to infiltrate his supposedly impenetrable fortress, destroy the cannons, capture Córdoba, and bring him back to the United States for trial.

The project changed shape before Dalton took part. The screenplay had originally been conceived as another Magnificent Seven film, with George Kennedy expected to reprise the team leader, Chris. The Mirisch brothers offered the film to George Peppard instead. Peppard agreed on the condition that his character not be called Chris and that the connection to The Magnificent Seven be removed. The leader became Rod, the group became the Magnificent Five, and the film was retitled Cannon for Cordoba.

Paul Wendkos offered Dalton the role of Jackson Harkness, the team’s second-most-important member. Jackson is not simply a substitute for Steve McQueen: his tense dynamic with Rod recalls the partnership of Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn in The Guns of Navarone. Jackson blames his former friend Rod for his brother’s death and vows to kill him if they survive their mission in Mexico. The film thus gave Dalton a part built around conflict with its leading man, rather than a straightforward reprise of the familiar McQueen-like role that had shadowed him.

Filming and Friendship

Dalton and Pete Duel worked together on location in Mexico. Duel, then a thirty-one-year-old actor with credits in Gidget and Love on a Rooftop, was part of the Magnificent Five. The two actors enjoyed tequila, pursued women, complained about Hollywood, and valued one another’s company. Their connection was more than a shared stretch of location work: both were living with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and both used alcohol as a form of self-medication without understanding that this was what they were doing.

For each man, drinking therefore appeared to be a personal weakness rather than a response to an illness neither had identified. Duel’s drinking was more severe. In 1971, at the height of his success on Alias Smith and Jones, he died by suicide. Dalton felt, privately, that he understood why Duel had done it. After Duel’s death, Dalton undertook the difficult work of relying less heavily on alcohol, making their time in Mexico part of a longer story about a bond whose significance became clearer only afterward.

Return to Mexico

Dalton worked in Mexico again in 1973, filming the revenge western The Deadly Trackers opposite Richard Harris in Durango. Both actors were heavy drinkers, but on location they maintained a weekday limit: they stayed off alcohol from Monday through Thursday, then drank from Friday night until Sunday afternoon. The arrangement marked a practical equilibrium rather than abstinence, and it contrasts with Dalton’s earlier, less conscious use of drinking as self-medication.

Across these productions, Mexico is not merely a backdrop. It is where Dalton’s work as a western actor intersected with the changing terms of his career, where he formed a consequential friendship with Duel, and where, years later, a workable pattern around drinking took shape. The country’s importance lies in those overlapping professional and personal histories, as well as in the fictional mission that gave Cannon for Cordoba its central action.