Seven Dollars to Kill / 7 dollari sul rosso (Alberto Cardone, 1966)

[Mickey13]

Copied from the Spagvemberfest 2024 thread:

@Mickey13

Film’s premise, which involves a bandit abducting a boy, then raising him as his own and eventually turning him into a baddie, offers great potential by reason of it being reminiscent of a Greek tragedy of some sort, especially when paired with the subplot about child’s legitimate father trying to retrieve his son against all the odds. Regrettably enough, the only tragedy here is that all the potential is so badly wasted, given that the production proves to be the usual quick-and-dirty work. The overarching issue consists in that Cardone employs a narrative scope of Tolstoyan proportions which predictably turns out messy in the extreme, considering Cardone’s habitually unfocused storytelling.

Though the project does not quite achieve the extravagant erraticism of Cardone’s Blood at Sundown, it exhibits the same problems in the midsection, namely in that the storyline introduces an excess number of characters in the middle which in turn entails neither the protagonist nor anybody else is properly substantiated along the line. In spite of narration’s extensive reach time-wise, the portrayal of time passage is virtually inexistent here which additionally saps story’s realism. Technically, the tale boils down to a revenge arc, yet it takes such a big detour by implementing elements of romance and a heist flick along the way that it is tough to determine what its intended purpose is supposed to be in the end, what with the vengeance oftentimes playing second fiddle to these haphazardly interposed motifs. On the whole, the pic ultimately comes out passable notwithstanding its wildly circuitous trajectory, that being said, it would be injudicious to call it a fully accomplished product.