The BBFC cut the scene in which Honor Blackman is killed for an A rating back in 1968. Unfortunately their Register entry just refers to ‘reduce’ rather than being specific.
However it used to play on UK TV with the sequence heavily cut and edited to imply that the Indian had suffocated her with sand in her mouth (removing the subsequent tossing about of her from Apache to Apache and the necklace suffocation- did Dario Argento see this as there is a similar death in Opera).
I always assumed that the cut version was the original UK cinema print although I could be mistaken.
This had a budget of $5m which is incredible considering The Good the Bad and The Ugly, which looks far more expensive, had a budget of only $1.3m. $1m went on Connery’s salary (vs $250k for Clint) and over $400k on Bardot’s salary. It did quite well at the box-office in both the UK and Italy but the American investor lost money as it was so expensive to make and only took about $2m in rentals.
I saw it again recently and my opinion of it improved, especially the first half an hour but the song is terrible and there isn’t a proper ending as Woody Strode gets told off by his dad and is sent home like a naughty child. The aristocrats were pompous idiots yet at the end we are supposed to have sympathy for the Peter Van Eck and Alexander Knox characters whereas I think a Corbucci or Sollima directed film would have had no sympathy for them. Why kill off Eric Sykes for no reason when he was being funny - why not kill the Knox character instead so his pretty wife could end up with Julian Mateos? Killing the servant rather than the master makes this on the wrong side of politics for me. Connery’s wardrobe could have been a lot better. I got the novel on Kindle to check out what they have changed.
I watched this one again too last weekend. It’s not a bad film, but it’s not very good either. The script is meandering and the first half of the movie is better than the second. I read somewhere that the script was altered a couple of times on the set because Connery wasn’t happy with some twists and turns. Never a good idea to make too many changes while filming. I didn’t particularly like Connery in this role. Bardot is of course beautiful, but she wasn’t convincing either. The supporting actors, on the other hand, were well-cast, especially Boyd, who is always good value when playing a bad guy.
The plot of the film follows the novel very closely, almost scene-for-scene as far as the activities of Shalako and the hunting party are concerned. However, there are a number of changes in detail and the climax has been changed in the film to make everything more ‘personal’ for Shalako.
The biggest change is that there is no final fight between Chato and Shalako and Chato’s dad doesn’t spare the hunting party. Chato is basically an ‘off-screen’ figure in the novel and Chato and Shalako never meet. Instead, Shalako has a fight with another Indian, Tats-ah-das-ay-go, who has been sneaking around the camp and killing members of the hunting party. I’d say Tats-ah-das-ay-go, who doesn’t appear in the film, is like the Apache assassin in The Stalking Moon (1969).
After Shalako kills the Apache, the remnants of the hunting party are rescued by Cavalry who have been looking for them. The book features several scenes with the Cavalry and also cavalry/Apache fights. No cavalry appear in the movie.
The sadistic necklace-swallowing murder doesn’t happen in the novel. Lady Daggett is not taken away by the villains in the stagecoach. Fulton shows no interest in her - instead he leers at Irina and asks her to go but she refuses. As Fulton doesn’t abduct Lady Daggett, he isn’t killed by her husband. Instead he is killed by Tats-ah-das-ay-go.
The Senator and his Mexican wife are not in the novel. Instead, there are another couple of boring women characters who do little. One of these is a senator’s daughter.
The rock climb is initiated by Shalako not the German Count. This appears to have been done in the film to make the German sympathetic, as the movie is more friendly to the rich people than the book. The Count does survive in the book though as in the film.
Irina is Welsh in the book, Obviously, they had to change this for Bardot’s casting.
Yes, obviously. Her accent is very strong, but everytthing but Welsh
I don’t understand why they skipped this Tats-ah-das-ay-go character, he would have been a great addition to the movie, and Woody Strode could have played the character very well.
Yes - it would have been better and yes they could have still cast Strode (who was part Indian; both of his grandmothers were Native American although not Apache.).
A film that cost nearly 4x The Good the Bad and The Ugly yet couldn’t afford any cavalry!
I don’t know which of the 4 credited writers - a lot since the novel is followed closely - came up with the new ending but I imagine it was the most contentious section of the screenplay as it is the major difference with the novel. I guess they didn’t like the fact that Shalako and Tats-ah-das-ay-go never meet until they fight at the end and Tas-ah-das-ay-go has no dialogue (which doesn’t matter in a book as L’Amour describes his thoughts). He basically follows Shalako and then infiltrates the hunting party when they are camped at the top of hill and kills them off one by one, disappearing and hiding after each killing. In neither film nor book do Fulton and Shalako have it out which I thought was a bit odd.
