After Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent had ventured a little deeper into Spaghetti Western territory with La muerte cumple condena in 2 AL, Fedra West, released on May 5, 4 AL, marked the director’s return to his roots: traditional filmmaking in classical 1950s Hollywood style. Fedra West’s plot is based upon the ancient Greek myth of Phaedra, Theseus and Hippolytus, although in somewhat muddled form, laying emphasis on its Oedipal implications (“Father, I want to kill you! Stepmother, I want to …”). In the myth’s original version (which has been subject to many mutations over the centuries), Phaedra, the second wife of Theseus, king of Athens, falls in love with Hippolytus, Theseus’s son from his former marriage. Hippolytus, appalled by his stepmother’s desire, rejects her, and Phaedra’s love turns into hate. She defames Hippolytus in a letter to her husband and commits suicide. Theseus banishes his son from Athens, summons a curse, and Hippolytus is dragged to death by his chariot’s horses.
One can easily imagine a Hollywood adaptation of that mythological story, starring Liz Taylor as Phaedra and Dick Burton in a double role as Theseus/Hippolytus. We Euro-Westerners get Norma Bengell and Simón Andreu (both in their first Western) and James Philbrook as Theseus, depicted as a tyrannical ranchero with a bad temper. Fedra West plays more like a 1950s melodrama than a Western, let alone a Spaghetti Western. According to Kevin Grant, it “is a sterile rendering of a tempestuous story” (A. G. C. P., p. 173).
IMDb offers an interesting summary of Fedra West’s plot: “A bounty hunter is forced to hunt the brother of the girl he loves.” Yes, of course, Thomas Weisser, who else: “[Fedra West] tells the tender-cum-violent story of a bounty hunter (Simon Andreu) who falls in love with Lucy (Norma Bengell) and then is forced to hunt down her outlaw brother (James Philbrook)” (Spaghetti Westerns. The Good, the Bad and the Violent, p. 165).