No Room to Die / Una lunga fila di croci (Sergio Garrone, 1969)

iā€™am crazy for this soundtrack!!! :smiley:

Wow!
I didnā€™t like it somehow.
Well I liked some parts of it but I still found it cheesy. Anyway definitely Iā€™ve heard worse! :wink:

What a brilliant spaghetti western - great directing with plenty of interesting camera angles and only let down by the score which seems more suited to a Giallo rather than a spaghetti.

This was my first Garrone and Steffen movie and Garrone impressed but I wasnā€™t sure whether I enjoyed Steffen or not - Stoney faced is not the word!

Coolest bit - William Bergerā€™s entire performance. From someone who I never rated (in fact avoided) I have watched a run of his movies and now really enjoy him - Heā€™s by far the best thing in the movie
coming across as ubercool and stealing the movie every time heā€™s onscreen

Wonderful movie - 8/10 (Would have been 9 with a better soundtrack)

ā€œDonā€™t you know itā€™s a sin to steal!!ā€ - classic!

Yeah, story, acting are great and direction, although sometimes a bit chaotic, is very good.
Truly good spaghetti western, something really worth a watch for more experienced fans.

I love this film, despite the flaws. I also like the music too. Soft spot in my heart for this film as it was my first Anthony Steffen experience.

I wrote a review a few years ago:

http://www.fistfulofpasta.com/index.php?go=reviews/noroomtodielen

I believe this is now available to US fans in The Best of Spaghetti Westerns in the Traditionā€¦ box set.

Strange coincidence when the film iā€™ve just watched has bumped up to the top of the forum!

Anyway, this film has no plot! Even the mexican smuggling thing is a bit of red-herring though an interesting and original theme for a spaghetti western. Garroneā€™s style of direction reminds me a lot of Carmineo, he picks interesting camera angles and movements and tells a convoluted (or in this case non-story) story. Itā€™s curious to compare this to Django The Bastard where the visual style fits perfectly with the simple plot thread of Djangoā€™s revenge. Things are shrouded in darkness, here, everything takes place (as another reviewer noted) in what seems like early morning and the film never really happens. It just neets a plot, a little substance to hang the style on. I couldnā€™t really understand how the film didnā€™t keep ending every twenty minutes or so, as each twenty minutes was a re-tread of the previous twenty minutes.

I suspect Anthony Steffen was the Steven Segal of SWs creating these vehicles for himself as a man so cool that he cannot be outdrawn. He can gundown five men at once. He certainly looks the part but his face lets him down when he has to act. Berger pretty much steals the movie with his bounty hunting preacher. Does he get the award for the coolest gun in a spaghetti western ever? And Nicoletta Machiavelli is hot.

The score has some nice themes but the dramatic d-da-da-da stings are pretty ridiculous.

All-in-all this is a decent movie but disappointing. Really itā€™s a lot of fairly well made individual scenes thrown together. I still have no idea about the flashback or why some of the double-crossing happened or where all the bad guys henchmen kept coming from.

BTW I first read about this ten years ago and have been waiting to see it since! Got a very nice copy of ebay which maybe is a Japanese SPO rip?

Interesting way to put it.

Yep - thatā€™s the one that I saw - living in the spaghetti starved UK Iā€™ve had to splurge and buy quite a few of the cheap boxsets from Amazon/Ebay - that one is particularly good

Pretty mediocre film IMO. I donā€™t know if itā€™s the movies fault or mine, but I had hard to pay attention to what was going on, and I felt like it really didnā€™t make any sense. However, I love the soundtrack, and William Berger kicks ass. 5/10

Yeah, Iā€™d give more for direction of Garrone if it wasnā€™t so chaotic.
But Iā€™d say itā€™s above average.

top spaghetti for my tastes, and a real winner of my top 20
9/10 8)

Iā€™m with AngelFace on the plot being aimless. Havenā€™t seen it in ages but I recall falling asleep halfway through. Luckily some of it is salvaged by a memorable duel that caps the picture (despite it having one of the most obvious continuity errors ever). This being considered ā€œone of Steffenā€™s bestā€ certainly speaks volumes of his extensive Western oeuvre.

I thought this was sort of a mess, probably Steffens weakest performance, imoā€¦ I loved William Bergerā€™s gun though.

Yes, the plot is weak but the strong characters, Joe Dā€™amatoā€™s great camerawork and the dark atmosphere makes it rise above the standard Steffen films. I liked most of the music but some of it would have been more fitting to horror film. The last duel scene is good though itā€™s obviously copied from GBU.

An average one with an enormous body-count and a really inventive killing scene - death by shovel ;D. And, as some others already mentioned, Iā€™m still wondering what Garrone wants us to know with that strange flashback-scene during the rooster fight. Maybe a residual of a cut sub-plot?

Watched it. Loved it. Crisp gunplay and sound-design. Flawless cinematography imho.

Did it have a plot? Sortaā€¦ It doesnā€™t matter. The ā€˜wine controversyā€™ is a non-starter. It couldā€™ve come from Vera Cruz or New Orleans, etc. Give a cowboy some wine 'n heā€™ll drink it. As for the flashback, it just reinforces the reality that cockfight-gambling is an old northern-Mexican tradition.

Fargo (Riccardo Garrone) kept reminding me of a 40-year-old Robert Taylor, who wouldā€™ve been sensational in SWā€™s at 40. Four stars.

Forthcoming on Blu-ray from Raro USA[url]http://rarovideousa.com/Hanging-for-Django-Available-for-pre-order[/url]

i canā€™t wait for the blue ray :smiley:

Still Blu Ray

Yep, always have to correct myself on that one most of the time though.