Actually a first time watch for me which is unusual for a Spaghetti Western. Somehow just never got round to it. But didn’t have time to watch Once Upon a Time in the West and needed to tick off Claudia Cardinale for my Spagvemberfest challenge. It’s a lightweight comedy of course with not much to recommend it except the loveliness of the two leads. It can’t be often that Bardot gets outshone but Cardinale was just drop dead gorgeous in this and makes it worth an hour and a half of anyone’s time just for that.
Wow I can’t believe I had never noticed this until you pointed it out! I sat there thinking of all the pre 60s films I’ve seen where the main good guy has a beard and I couldn’t think of any.
Well! My girl has pulled The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone, 1966) from the tub. Not the most “Saturday Night” of movies but I’m certainly not complaining. I’ve got the KL 4K but tbh I’m sorely tempted to go with my MGM “yellow/green” Blu-ray. I’m pretty much in a minority of one but I love that colour timing, I think it’s perfect for the material.
Rewatch. This is a nice little mid card SW. While light on the action, the story is very well told and plays out fine.
Dean Reed does a good job at playing the suave gentleman gunslinger - a character type I wasn’t certain would work in the SW world, but was gladly mistaken - who isn’t just a pretty face and can shoot and fight. It’s a shame he didn’t stay in Italy, he would’ve had a very lucrative career. Peter Martell once again hits all the right marks as the main antagonist, he does charming and sadistic with ease. Piero Lulli is his usual baddie best.
The Koch Media (now Plaion Pictures) DVD looks really good on my 4K player.
LVC at his peak, grizzled but not without plenty of humor. I sorta wondered during this rewatch if the film perhaps could’ve been even greater if JPL’s role was mute. Physically I get it (the blue eyes, uncanny), but good lord his own dub work is pretty bad. Really bad. That said, the visual look is dirty and dusty, the score by Morricone is a score by Morricone, and the revenge is eaten cold. That’s all you need sometimes.
Day 2: Down with Your Hands, You Scum! (Django Story) (1971) D: Demofilo Fidani. Starring Hunt Powers, Jerry Ross, Dino Strano and Gordon Mitchell. Django (Powers) shares stories from his career as a bounty with a young Wild Bill Hickock (Ross). Django Story started out promising. However, it didn’t take me long to figure out that Fidani used footage from his other films to as flashback scenes while the elderly Django is telling the young Wild Bill stories from his career. Much of the film is padded out by exterior shots of Hunt Powers shooting banditos and gringo outlaws one by one on a rampage. The banditos and outlaws offer no resistance by shooting back. They just stand in one place and fall over with a scream. Rating: 1/5.
I’ve avoided this one for too long. Today is the day to watch it. The version broadcastded on Portuguese Star Movies is perfect, with Italian audio. I have understood from the comments on social media that the Portuguese public does not really appreciate the broadcast of films in this language. Something curious because in the sixties, seventies and eighties there was a great predominance of films in this language.
Although once again directed by Duccio Tessari, ‘Return’ is the polar opposite of ‘A Pistol For Ringo’; both in story, execution, mood, and characterisation…which is most certainly not a bad thing.
The cocky, confident, main character from the first film (played excellently by Giuliano Gemma), is replaced here by a man who has lost everything…his wife and child, his confidence, his prestige, and his will to live. Gemma is again superb in the part, and this role as a down-trodden ‘hero’, really tests his acting range and athleticism to the limits.
The same cast return from ‘Pistol’, but this time in completely different roles. Fernando Sancho is more subdued, Antonio Casas is a drunken sheriff, Parajito sells flowers, Nieves Navarro is as sexy as hell, and George Martin is a thorough-going nasty bastard.
Lorella de Luca portrays the absolute personification of ‘beauty’, and is the most gorgeous ‘widow in mourning’ that I have ever seen…
This oater is a worthy follow up to ‘Pistol’, and the significant differences between the two ‘Ringo’ films are what make them so eminently watchable, time after time…
Lastly, this classic SW features yet another excellent soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, and the melancholic main theme is perfectly rendered by Maurizio Graf…
A typically average early spaghetti but Gemma’s usual charm helps elevate it slightly depsite the really annoying theme tune that repeats constantly during the film
Though combining a heist story with a revenge arc might not sound too good on paper, the flick in question succeeds for a number of reasons: firstly, it furnishes plenty of secondary characters whose characterological quirks and idiosyncrasies come to apply detail, rendering the storyline rather memorable and shedding some additional light on the protagonist along the way; this can be seen for instance in the characters of the machine-gun-toting organist played by Torres or the (literally) lousy old-timer who is friends with the main hero. Secondly, the plot likewise includes elements of romance and family drama both of which turn out surprisingly effective in spite of their relative superficiality and brevity, making tale’s progression substantially more engaging along the line.
These various stabs at overall variegation and character development all coalesce into a surprisingly robust backdrop which appears all the more remarkable in view of the fact that what one is dealing with here is basically a piece of ultra-low-budgeted genre moviemaking with little to nothing in the way of resources or shooting locations. Both of the two main narrative pillars revolving around the heist scheme and the vengeance subplot are handled reasonably well too, meaning that both the foreground and the background prove entirely agreeable, all of which is additionally bolstered by the fine performances given by Karis, Palmara and Powers. Outside of film’s slower pacing in the midsection, occasionally mediocre camerawork and poor production values, it is hard to think of anything which could have been helmed better here, especially in light of project’s acutely limited budget. On the whole, a bit of a tour de force in low-budget genre filmmaking and Mauri’s best western by far.
The 5-Man Army (dir. Italo Zingarelli, Don Taylor)
Peter Graves plays the Dutchman, the brain behind an operation to rob $500,000 worth of gold from a Mexican government train. But, of course, he needs help to pull off the heist, so he enlists a few colorful companions: foodie Bud Spencer is the usual muscle-man, sideshow performer, knife-throwing Samurai (Tetsurô Tanba), a world-weary dynamite expert (James Daly), and a troublemaking, sharp-shooting kid (Nino Castelnuovo)
Movies of this kind live and die by their characterization as well as the chemistry of the cast, and this one is elevated by a wonderful array of characters, strong performances and robust direction from Don Taylor. Nearly half of the movie being a nail-biting, kinetic train robbery set-piece was a big surprise and I had a lot of fun with this that.
For a Zapata Western with serious tone it is a bit light on politics—the themes of revolution were lurking in the background and never becomes something much more, it’s just there. Perhaps it was never meant to be more than a straightforward mobile heist film with characters you’d love hanging out with. This is a nice movie to kick off the month. I loved it.
Another double header of Hall of Famers with Mark Damon in his quintessential western role and Rosalba Neri stealing the whole show as the perfect evil beauty. For me this was Neri’s best role. Stunningly gorgeous and coldly treacherous.
Oh, goody! My random selection for this evening is another top-drawer number: Day of Anger (Valerii, 1967), in which the dastardly Angel Eyes does his damnedest to turn the naive Angel Face into a little tinker. Ooh, you dastard!
No. 3: DER SCHREI DER SCHWARZEN WÖLFE
(The Cry Of The Black Wolves)
Remembering the late Ron Ely.
This is a German adventure movie (in SWDB listed as Eurowestern) in the vein of the Zanna Bianca/White Fang stuff.
Sympathic Ron Ely is in the lead as Trapper Bill Robbins and we have Raimund Harmstorf (also in Fulcis Zanna Bianca films) as bounty hunter.
Real nice stuff filmed mainly in Austria.
I have watched Super 8 version…two 120m reels with about 35 Minutes runtime in total. First reel with great Agfa colours, second reel Eastman red.
Pretty typical revenger. Uses Chekov’s gun so much the thing jams. Brett Halsey’s perpetually sad face does wonders in elevating the role. Plenty watchable but nothing special, and definitely not without some incredulous moments.
