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Worth seeing
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Embassy Pictures was an independent film maker that had some big hits with non-Westerns The Lion in Winter, The Producers and in particular, The Graduate. The year before The Graduate, the company made a Universal-style Western, the sort of thing Audie Murphy would have starred in, An Eye for an Eye. It soon aired on TV (ABC) but is in fact a good little feature Western.
It had excellent Western lead actors, not galactically stellar, perhaps, but to any Western fan a good cast: Pat Wayne played Benny Wallace, real name Pat Garrett Jr, bounty hunter son of the famous sheriff (he of course was to play that Pat Garrett in Young Guns in 1988). Slim Pickens was the chief heavy. His slimy sidekick was Strother Martin. And Paul Fix played the decent store-owner and paterfamilias. That’s a pretty damn good line-up by any standards.
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Pat Wayne
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Lead, though, was Robert Lansing as Talion, the gunman seeking revenge on Slim for murdering his family. Lansing was not a top Western movie star. In fact, this was his only feature, though he was in quite a few TV Westerns. It’s a pity because he’s actually good as the tough, laconic loner with a past. He also looks a little bit like Steve McQueen.
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Robert Lansing
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The picture has other merits. In particular, the visual. It was photographed by Lucien Ballard, no less, one of the greatest of all Western cinematographers. The Lone Pine locations are magnificent and in Ballard’s signature long shots and long shadows, they deserve to be seen on the big screen, though of course 99.9% of us won’t.
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Strother
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And the direction is pacey, tight and has the right mix of action and thoughtfulness. Admire, for example, how Slim Pickens’s loathsomeness is established in only the first sixty seconds of the film. In that time he manages to rape the absent hero’s wife, shoot her and their child and burn down their cabin with the bodies in it, all with an evil smile. Michael D. Moore was known as an assistant director (he later worked on the Indiana Jones movies) but did a solid job with this Western.
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The great Slim Pickens being evil
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Yes, the writing (Bing Russell and Sumner Williams) occasionally verges on the too-conventional (it is essentially the Nth revenge drama) but the plot is original enough to eschew banality: in an early shoot-out in a box canyon Slim manages, before escaping, to cripple Lansing’s gun hand and blind Wayne. So the two gunmen become a team, using Lansing’s eyes and Wayne’s gun. Lansing teaches Wayne to shoot blind. If this sounds silly, it isn’t; director, actors and writers manage to get it to work, and it leads to a tense final showdown.
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Showdown
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Wayne is (he always was) competent and earnest. Stuttering Strother is splendidly verminous (what a great Western actor he was). Fix is stolid, decent and fair. Slim is, naturally, brilliant. It was ’66 and he hadn’t quite yet put on so much weight as he was later to do. He was still convincing as a fast gun and of course was always superb on a horse. So the acting is really top notch. Fix’s daughter, who falls for Lansing, is Gloria Talbott. She was a stalwart of TV Western shows but had also appeared in a few features – The Oklahoman, The Young Guns (not Young Guns) and Cattle Empire.
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The Fix family. Doesn’t the little boy look like him?
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You should get to see An Eye for an Eye if you can. Don’t be put off by the appalling spaghetti-style whistling over the opening titles (“Whistling by Muzzy Marcellino,” we are told). Turn the sound down for the opening two minutes and just admire the Ballard scenery, smiling with anticipation when you see names like Pickens, Martin or Fix appear on the screen.
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Having fun as the bad guys
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8 Responses
I was pleasantly surprised with this movie.When it started I was expecting a horribly dubbed spaghetti western but that wasn’t the case.The whistling fooled me .
I agree entirely.
I had to force myself to watch this western. The cast was great, as was the location. That’s it. The script was poorly written, the acting was terrible, and the gun handling was laughable. The direction by Moore was at its worse. This movie deserves to be forgotten.
That’s the beauty of Jeff’s blog. You have all the classics, sometimes revisited by his sharp prose, unknown or forgotten nuggets or very weak movies but since they are westerns, Jeff was able to expound on them, trying to find them some merit even minimal…
I am deeply surprised that Jeff did not mention the director a single time… Not his style at all.
Canadian Michael Moore (1914-2013) was an interesting fellow having started his career as a child actor in a dozen of silent films, sitting on the laps of such stars as Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson. As a 5 year-old toddler, he worked with Cecil B. DeMille, who would mentor him as he transitioned to directing in adulthood. During his career, he was mostly working as an assistant director or a second unit director, contributing to more than 200 movies over nine decades. For example for Gunfight at the O.K. Corral or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Missouri Breaks, The Return of a Man Called Horse, but also the 3 first Indiana Jones or Patton.
During the 1950s and 1960s, he began directing TV shows and made a few feature films including An Eye for an Eye and Buckskin (1968), an adaptation of Allan W. Eckerts’s 1967 novel, Frontiersman.
If Jeff is mentioning Buckskin here and there, strangely enough it never had been honored in his blog (or I have been unabled to find it…)
Buckskin is the last of these 13 low-budget oaters A.C. Lyles produced for Paramount that Jeff says they were qualified as geezer (or geriatric) westerns as they starred actors well past their glory days who were Lyles’ friends. The story is quite well used (it has a few gritty moments though) and the set looking much cheaper than any western TV episode. But it is fun to watch one more time all these seasoned, if not old, Western actors :
Barry Sullivan, Wendell Corey, Joan Caulfield, Lon Chaney Jr., John Russell,
Barbara Hale, Barton MacLane (his last film), Leo Gordon, Emile Meyer, Richard Arlen…
I must say I was happily surprised by Wendell Corey as the town boss, much better as a villain than the usual good naïve guy he played in general. John Russell is one of the best on the stage.
Like others have said (including critic Derek Winnert), this was a pleasant surprise and, as Jeff said, well worth a watch. Lansing is excellent and Wayne is decent, especially when he becomes handicapped by blindness. I found it interesting that Pat Wayne is playing the son of a famous man (Pat Garrett) that he’s trying to live up to (or live down). Being the son of a legend in real life, I’m sure it was easy to find inspiration for the role. So far, this is the best performance from him that I’ve seen.
During the second half of the 60s and the early 70s, Westerns tracked with the broader culture in becoming rather bleak, almost to the point of desolation, and borderline nihilistic. These were traits of the spaghettis and the Peckinpahs, among others. An Eye for an Eye is an example of this shift.
It is austere, stark and tragic in the postmodern rather than the classical sense. It is also very, very good.
Robert Lansing is the leading man, and as Jeff Arnold notes, he carries a strong whiff of Steve McQueen, although I prefer Lansing. If Lansing had devoted himself to Westerns the way Randolph Scott and John Wayne did, he would likely be a popular favorite of almost all hardcore fans of the genre.
And speaking of John Wayne, his son Pat plays second fiddle to Lansing in this one. This film is the first performance of his I’ve seen. I thought his acting was uneven in the beginning but, just like the film in general, improved as it went along.
Pat plays a young bounty killer in this picture and although he did well enough, I’m not sure the casting was ideal. Frankly, the actor seemed almost too sweet and genial for that line of work.
That said, the relationship between his Pat Garrett, Jr. and Lansing’s Talion was very well done. Now in a sense it appears to have been lifted from For a Few Dollars More, which was released a year before An Eye for an Eye. Hence, a brash young bounty hunter links up with a a jaded older bounty hunter in pursuit of a gang of villains. And in both films, money is the sole motivation of the youger of the two while the elder is stimulated by a quest for revenge. Regardless, the bonding that occurs between Garrett, Jr. and Talion is just as convincing as that between Manco and Mortimer and even more moving because in the former dyad, the physically disabled bounty hunters are forced to rely upon one another for survival.
The support in this movie is beyond reproach. Slim Pickens plays the primary villain and he is always worth watching. Strother Martin is terrific in his customary role of a slightly pathetic blackguard whose perfidy is a bit more than a nuiscance to all who encounter him. And Paul Fix is the film’s moral exemplar. He’s a family man and a business man who merely desires proper law and order. He also has scruples against bounty killers.
An Eye’s for an Eye’s final showdown is believable–despite an artifice that, on its face, seems improbable–and well staged. It is also bittersweet with an emphasis on bitter. (Spoiler): Garrett, Jr. is gunned down cold and there are no final words for him. In truth, this is one of the most affecting deaths I’ve seen in a Western. The character had a strange innocence about him, and he sacrificed himself totally for his new friend Talion.
In the final analysis, this a tough, unsentimental Western that could become a favorite if you give it a chance. I’d urge anybody to do so.
PS–In archaic Greece, “an eye for an eye” was lex Talionis, or Talion law. This is obviously where Lansing’s character’s name comes from. And indeed, he does meet out his namesake’s law to those who harmed him, his wife and child.
Correction–Talionic law sprang from ancient Babylon, not Greece. My ancient history is getting a bit rusty.