Toshiro Mifune brought his own pantry to Spain. During the filming of Red Sun in Almería, he apparently kept the international cast and crew supplied with Japanese ingredients and happily traded recipes for French and Italian cooking. It’s a fitting anecdote for a movie in which a Japanese samurai, an American outlaw, a French villain, and several European performers find themselves sharing the same stretch of the Wild West. Even before anybody draws a weapon, the casting makes for an interesting dinner party.

The year is 1870, and a train carrying Japan’s ambassador to the United States is making its way across the American frontier. Among the delegation’s gifts is an ornate golden sword intended for President Ulysses S. Grant. Unfortunately, the train is also carrying something far more tempting to a couple of professional bandits: the opportunity to rob it. Link (Charles Bronson, Once Upon a Time in the West) and his partner Gauche (Alain Delon, Le Samouraï) lead the holdup, but Gauche decides that sharing is overrated. He betrays Link, steals the ceremonial sword, and leaves his former accomplice in a decidedly unfortunate position.

The sword belongs to the Japanese delegation, and recovering it is a matter of honor for samurai bodyguard Kuroda (Mifune, The Hidden Fortress). Link wants revenge and the money Gauche stole, so an uneasy partnership becomes the most practical solution. The pair set off across the desert together, each convinced the other is an obstacle he must tolerate until the job is finished. Link is a thief who measures success in dollars and survival; Kuroda is governed by discipline, duty, and a code that doesn’t leave much room for improvisation. Their arguments don’t require a translator. The difference in how they carry themselves tells us almost everything.

Along the way, the men encounter people connected to Gauche, including the alluring Cristina (Ursula Andress, Dr. No), whose loyalties are not necessarily as straightforward as Link would like. Capucine (The Pink Panther) is also part of a cast that seems assembled from several different national cinemas. There’s a lot of plotting around the sword and the pursuit, but the real entertainment comes from watching Bronson and Mifune get on each other’s nerves. Bronson’s familiar scowl is put to excellent use, while Mifune moves through the film with the focused intensity of somebody who doesn’t understand why everyone around him insists on making simple things difficult.

Director Terence Young, who helped launch the James Bond series with Dr. No, has a fine eye for putting charismatic people in handsome locations. Cinematographer Henri Alekan makes the Almería landscape feel appropriately vast, and Maurice Jarre’s score gives the adventure a touch of grandeur. The Spanish terrain had already played the American West in countless European productions, but the combination of actors here makes the familiar scenery feel a little different. Young isn’t trying to reinvent the western. He’s seeing what happens when two traditions collide in the middle of one.

Mifune is the standout. His Kuroda doesn’t need to announce his strength, and his reactions to Link’s opportunism provide some of the film’s best comedy. Bronson, a major box-office attraction overseas by this point, is smart enough to let his partner command a scene rather than competing for every close-up. Delon makes an appealingly cold adversary, and Andress adds a little sparkle whenever the pursuit threatens to become too solemn. The physical action is satisfying, but it’s the cultural mismatch that supplies the real personality. A samurai and an outlaw ride into a western, and the punchline is that they make an excellent team.

Not everything moves at the pace it should. The middle section wanders, and some of the English-language dubbing calls attention to just how many countries are represented in the cast. The film opened in France and Japan in 1971, with American audiences waiting until June 1972. A young John Landis even appears among the henchmen, a fun bit of trivia for anyone playing spot-the-future-director. What keeps Red Sun enjoyable is the rare opportunity to watch Bronson and Mifune work together at the height of their screen personas. They don’t have to understand each other for us to understand why the pairing works.