This is a film I have watched time and again. It’s not one of the great SWs (although I think Thomas Weisser said so). It’s in my alternative top 20 though. I have added a review (written between matches) to the films page:
The pictures are not so good, but they are the best I could lift from my copies. I think by the way the Titanus release has a slightly better audio than the Wild East release. But none of them do full justice to Bruno Nicolai’s score.
I received the Wild East DVD today after less than a week after placing the order. Craig Hill is a bit stiff but OK. I agree about the horrible and crow-imitating voice of the Fernando Sancho character which was so bad that I nearly never heard what he said. English subtitles would have been great for me on this DVD. I also agree on the fine music by Nicolai even if it is not so frequent or dominating. The locations I didn’t recognise, but some hills with very white rocks and light green vegetation should be Italian.
The story in full detail I will try to examine better in my next watching, maybe with my wife who might hear better and can explain to me :-).
I guess my rating could be 5 or 6/10 in the not so distant future.
I still lean toward Italian landscapes but can’t rule out also areas rather near Hoyo de Manzanares especially in the end. Anyhow my second watching just 5 days later was enough for me to decide on a 6/10 rating, thus ranked 45 on my revised SW top 50. The very good Bruno Nicolai main theme together with for me this time a comprehensible and reasonably entertaining story decided the verdict
43 Yankee (Tinto Brass)
44. May God Forgive You … But I Won’t (Vincenzo Musolino) 45 And the Crows Will Dig Your Grave (Juan Bosch)
46 Fury Of Johnny Kid/Ride For A Massacre (Gianni Puccini)
47 The Brute And The Beast/Massacre Time (Lucio Fulci)
Two years later but not enough wiser I guess that at least some scenes, for example the green hills around the house/ruin of the outlaw Glenn Kovacs (Frank Braña), were shot in Spain in areas with dry climate, maybe west of Barcelona, Fraga (?), since IMDb states Esplugas City, Barcelona (as one of the western towns).
Green areas in Italian SWs I beleive tend to be much more green due to a more humid climate.
This movie’s page in the SWDb has been updated to the new layout. Please report any errors, and let us know if you can add information, links, reviews or images.
You Tube have a decent print of this - I think in both Italian and English although I watched the English dubbed version (which had Italian titles). It runs 82m which I think must be Pal as per the DVD details posted here so that’s 85m in NTSC. The Italian censor records 91m although it may never have been released at that length.
As some have observed, much of this is a tit for tat prisoner/policeman affair which reminded me more of Shoot Gringo Shoot than The Big Gundown. In Shoot Gringo Shoot the prisoner was the bad guy’s father rather than brother. It starts off with an interesting premise concerning the Wells Fargo company dealing out special badges to bounty hunters which allows them to kill anyone without comeback but makes little of that since when we later see rival Wells Fargo agent Fernando Sancho he and his goons has been employed as hired guns and he seems to have forgotten his job. There are some geographical problems and the holding back of the main bad guy until about 15-20m before the end didn’t help. One especially funny scene in which Craig Hill tells the heroine he won’t hurt her and then immediately slaps her face when she starts to become hysterical - I guess that doesn’t count as ‘hurting’ in Italy. It was a little convoluted and I found it difficult to sympathise with anyone.
