The supporting cast includes Charles Bronson as Fierro, Herbert Lom as Huerta and Alexander Knox as Madero.

Lee Arnold has to unexpectedly land his biplane in Mexico due to technical difficulties and here he hears both the Mexican army and the local peasant view on Pancho Villa: one seeing him as an outlaw, the other as a hero.

A local family take him in and repair his plane and Arnold finds the daughter Fina attractive.

The father is taken to the village square and is to be hanged alongside a handful of other men, allegedly for helping Villa.

But suddenly a Maxim gun starts firing from a rooftop into the soldiers - but the father is not rescued from death.

They create a game where one of Villa's men Fierro (Bronson) tries to shoot them as they run in small groups to try to escape over a wall... all in the test are killed.

As the rebels retreat the army launch a cavalry charge across the river (the barbed wire mysteriously disappears) armed with sabres.

The town is captured but the leader of the revolutionary army, Gen Huerta, orders Villa's arrest.

After a delay he is again about to be shot but Huerta stops it as he has received a telegram ordering Villa to go to Mexico City.

In the final scene Arnold is wining and dining a girl in a restaurant when Villa enters with Fierro and his aide.

The epilogue pronounces Villa's successful capture of Mexico City six months later at the head of a revolutionary army of 50,000.

"[4] Film critic A. H. Weiler wrote, "Yul Brynner, Robert Mitchum, cavalry, politicos and even the faint strains of "La Cucaracha" fail to disguise the fact that Villa Rides which dashed into the Forum Theater yesterday, is simply a sprawling Western and not history.

As such it incessantly fills the screen with the din of pistols and rifles, and assorted warfare and wenching, shot in sharp color on rugged Spanish sites that strikingly simulate Mexico.

Any resemblance to the 1912-1914 campaigns of the bandit-revolutionary in the cause of liberal President Madero and against General Huerta is purely coincidental.