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See it if you absolutely must
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You can tell it’s a spaghetti within the first 15 seconds. It starts with a shot of horses’ hooves and then an ultra-close-up of faces. Bingo. Spaghetti. Why they were so obsessed with horses’ hooves is hard to say..
This one is directed by Enzo G Castellari, an actor in various Z-films who ‘graduated’ to directing such art movies as this, his first, or Sette Winchester per un Massacro, and Go Kill Everybody and Come Back Alone, and other masterpieces of this type.
It stars New Yorker Edd Byrnes (Ed Byrne was a gambler in Georgetown, Colo shot by Sheriff Pat Desmond but this fellow is no relation) in very 1960s hair (he combed it endlessly, you remember, in 77 Sunset Strip). Co-starring are Uruguayan ‘George Hilton’ (Two Sons for Ringo, Halleluja for Django, and so on, and so on) and good old standby Mexican Gilbert Roland, in his sixties, who provided the caddish mustache in any number of low-grade stuff and was famously The Cisco Kid.
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So much for the acting.
As for the rest, it is standard spaghetti. Bad music, dubbing, absurd gunshots, facial close-ups, acrobats, all the clichés they love. I sometimes think that Cinecittà must have trawled the scuole medie (lower secondary schools) all over Italy in a recruiting drive to assemble the scriptwriters. The dialogue is so corny that only 13-year-olds could have written it. No fewer than six writers are credited to this film (I won’t bother to list them all). I think their combined age can’t have been more than 78.
There is a train. I wonder where they got it. It trundles across the flat lands (as we know, the trains in Spain stay mainly in the plain).
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There’s a cheesy pop ballad over the opening and closing titles, as per usual.
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The plot involves so many baddies (they are all baddies) double-crossing each other that the ending, after a ‘tense’ (ha ha) three-way Good, Bad, Ugly-style face-off, does at least come as a slight surprise.
It was made in 1967, released in ’68 but already the genre was becoming stale and tired and repeating itself.
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See it if you absolutely must.
3 Responses
“I sometimes think that Cinecittà must have trawled the scuole medie (lower secondary schools) all over Italy in a recruiting drive to assemble the scriptwriters. The dialogue is so corny that only 13-year-olds could have written it. No fewer than six writers are credited to this film (I won’t bother to list them all). I think their combined age can’t have been more than 78.”
This passage suggests to me the opening scenes of The Cowboys. Imagine Cinecittà in 1967 (dialogue as subtitled)…
Director (John Wayne): I have to shoot a Western in six weeks. Where are the screenwriters?
Producer (Slim Pickens): They’ve all run off to the antiwar protests.
Director: What will I do?
Producer: Maybe you can get some at the scuola media over there…
Laughed at your comments. Lots of writers is one of those warning signs, isn’t it. A thing I look out for in modern films is a large number of small sources providing the cash – especially public funds from the EU (sorry, Jean-Marie). I settle down for what sounds like it could be something entertaining, then there’s an endless list of public funding – and something in me knows it’s going to be tedious.
The way of financing a film varies greatly from country to countrys…
And financing a film is more and more expensive. James Bond films are partly sponsored by the ads widely disseminated all along the films and by the regions where they are shot…
The credits are after the end of the films and I do not go to the movies to watch the credits, do you !?
The screenwriters number is an other story. It is not by chance that Hollywood has invented the script doctor. But not every time the doctor finds the right medication. Appearing often “uncredited”, Ben Hecht (Stagecoach, The Outlaw, Duel in the Sun, The Secret of Convict Lake ) is probably one of the most famous.