Production Notes
During the filming of a scene where Maria attempts to escape through a canyon wired with dynamite, Cardinale's stunt double was badly injured. Cardinale, who had never ridden a horse before, performed the stunt herself in the final cut.
The movie was filmed in Technicolor on location in Death Valley and the Valley of Fire, showing the latter prominently. During filming, the cast and crew stayed in Las Vegas. Actor Woody Strode wrote in his memoirs that he and Marvin got into a lot of pranks, on one occasion shooting an arrow into Vegas Vic, the famous smiling cowboy neon sign outside The Pioneer Club.
Portions of the film were shot in the Coachella Valley, California. The railway scenes were filmed on Kaiser Steel's Eagle Mountain Railroad. The steam locomotive seen in the movie currently resides on the Heber Valley Railroad.
Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin did not get along during filming due to Marvin's alcoholism, which was making him unreliable and difficult at the time, infuriating Lancaster. Director Richard Brooks, who had worked with Lancaster before, felt the need to intervene because he feared Lancaster was going to "take Lee Marvin by the ass and throw him off that mountain".
The movie was made one year after Lee Marvin won the Oscar for Cat Ballou (1965) and the year before his seminal World War II smash hit The Dirty Dozen (1967). Marvin's other most famous role, as Liberty Valance in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance opposite James Stewart and John Wayne, had been filmed in 1962.
The cast listing at the very beginning of the film remains most unusual in that the billing appears out of order. Lee Marvin is shown first, demonstrating a machine gun while his name superimposes on the screen, Robert Ryan is billed next over a sequence in which he knocks down a man for punching a horse, then Woody Strode is shown subduing an unruly prisoner that he's just brought into a frontier town, and finally Burt Lancaster's name appears over a humorous scene with Lancaster in bed with another man's wife then subsequently hurriedly escaping down a street after being interrupted by the furious husband. Lancaster actually has top billing but is billed under the other Professionals as a visual punchline at the top of the film, then at the movie's conclusion is listed first over Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, and Woody Strode as they ride toward the camera.
Read more about this topic: The Professionals (1966 film)
Famous quotes containing the words production and/or notes:
“[T]he asphaltum contains an exactly requisite amount of sulphides for production of rubber tires. This brown material also contains “ichthyol,” a medicinal preparation used externally, in Webster’s clarifying phrase, “as an alterant and discutient.””
—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“In trying to understand the appeal of best-sellers, it is well to remember that whistles can be made sounding certain notes which are clearly audible to dogs and other of the lower animals, though man is incapable of hearing them.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)