[quote=“scherpschutter, post:9202, topic:141”]Buon Funerale Amigos!.. Paga Sartana
Longest sartana ever, it took me two days to watch it.
When I finally picked my Spanish DVD from the pile, it proved to be a defective disc. It plays alright for a while, then starts freezing again and again.
Luckily I could pick up a torrent at cinemageddon.
Not my favorite Sartana.[/quote]
my worst of the 4 with garko sartana, and the ending kill the movie totally… ???
To me they’re rather close, but the first one is still my favorite, I don’t see much light between the others.
In general I think the Sartanas are okay spaghettis, but none of them is in my Top 20
I’ve only seen two Sartanas so far (the first one and Have A Good Funeral) and I think I like the Sartana character a lot more than the movies themselves.
I tend to view westerns according to directors. Then writers, stars, and the era of whatever film’s release-date was.
The Ruthless Four Loved it. Di Leo sure can write a screenplay!
Duel in the Eclipse by Merino
oh, i have no words - this is TOP 10 western for me
i can´t believe someone made such a movie
a real gem
10/10
[quote=“tomas, post:9226, topic:141”]Duel in the Eclipse by Merino
oh, i have no words - this is TOP 10 western for me
i can´t believe someone made such a movie
a real gem
10/10[/quote]
10 out of 10?? ???
11/10
I was in the mood for some Sollima so I watched Run Man, Run. An exciting picaresque SW adventure with Milian in top shape - it’s been a while since I’ve seen a film of his, almost forgot how damn good he can be - and plenty of memorable characters, in the same league as the other two Sollima SW, if you ask me. I only wish Donald O’ Brien’s character was slightly more fleshed out, but that’s really the film’s only flaw. One of the best opening credit and opening song too.
Absolutely!
EL PURO-Mulargia
My first viewing!
Now this is a truly gem! Really good western imo, Mulargia’s best. R. Woods was really good in is character and the rest of the cast was ok. Not enough gunplay, but the screenplay makes up for it. I can’t get the theme song out of my head now, lol. 8/10
CEMETERY WITHOUT CROSSES (1969) by Robert Hossein and co-starring Hossien and Michele Mercier. They had made several Angelique films together.
An absolutely outstanding folk ballad of a western.
Terse, spartan, austere, as hardboiled as a noir, filled with elegiac imagery and ear-pleasing acoustic sounds.
The clear text is definite, the subtext is pregnant with emotion, the plotting progresses logically but in unexpected ways, and the dialogue is worthy of David Mamet. Almost.
If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d swear this was a psychological thriller directed by Claude Chabrol.
Michelle Mercier is not just a beauty. I mean, we know she’s a beauty from the Angelique series, but instead of being a bouyant adventuress, here she is deadly serious. Her grief and sadness drives the film. She keeps her clothes on this time, and is actually all the more sexy clad in mourning black. As the story unfolds she turns from a victim into a black widow and back again. Wonderful performance I could watch all day. Whoever dubbed her into English has a lilting quality in her voice that I like. Voices are important, and Hossein gets all the voices just right. The dubbing is so correct it makes other spaghetti westerns look slovenly in comparison.
CEMETERY WITHOUT CROSSES now occupies the 2nd position in my list of favorite spaghetti westerns, moving FACCIA Y FACCIA into third place.
The only flaw is a techno-pop tune and song heard at the beginning, the end, and four times in the middle. It is at odds with the mournful acoustic guitars applied throughout the rest of the film, and it violates the melancholy tone of the film. Big mistake. But the film is so damn good I can overlook it. Mostly.
After spending two months trying to find a DVD, I watched an excellent quality bootleg without feeling a pang of guilt. It may have been sourced from the oop Japanese DVD.
Richard
True, especially in the kidnapping scene it is quite intrusive and inappropriate.
I saw Anthony Mann’s The Far Country with James Stewart and Walter Brennan yesterday. An excellent Western that had a real feeling for the time and place, highlighted by some expertly staged action scenes like (Spoiler) the death of Brennan’s character and the final climactic shootout. Along with The Naked Spur, this is probably my favourite of the Mann-Stewart Western collaborations.
My favorite Mann-Stewart western is whichever one I’m watching. I can never make up my mind. THE FAR COUNTRY is very fine. I know THE WESTERNER is my least favorite. I can’t seem to connect with it.
I just watched Blue Underground’s restoration of Sergio Sollima’s RUN, MAN, RUN (1968). It does justice to the film, and Sollima continues to impress me. A first-rate director and story-teller. His films are more substantial than most spaghetti / Zapata westerns, and more ambitious than his crime films. But RUN, MAN, RUN has more to do peasant revolt in Spain and Italy than it does in Mexico. The Mexican revolution and its causes are a study of mine, and I don’t find Sollima connected to the circumstances and events of that conflict. The spirit is the same, but despite the Mexican locale of the story, the sensibility at work is pure European.
I have to to think about whether or not RUN, MAN, RUN goes in my top ten, but it is definitely way up there.
Richard
[size=12pt]CAHILL: US MARSHALL[/size] (1973, Andrew V. McLaglen)
Odd western with Big John as an aging marshall whose sons go astray when they make some ‘bad friends’ because daddy isn’t home enough. Sounds more like a contemporary drama than a western, and indeed, it appears that this was intended to be a movie about a cop more busy with his job than with his two growing up kids at home. But finally they decided to turn the whole thing into a western (Wayne did a couple of cop thrillers in those days and they weren’t very successful).
It’s not great, but it’s watchable. Wayne looks a bit tired, but he saves himself with his usual bravoura and turns in a pretty good performance. George Kennedy (as the leader of the boys’ ‘bad friends’) and Neville Brand (as a halfbreed tracker) are also very good. The boys (especially Gary Grimes) are a bit irritating. Some good (quite violent) action scenes, some good location work across the border (Durango), but McLaglen’s direction is uninspired and there are too many scenes shot on sound stages.
The 2 cop films were made after Cahill.
Correct McQ the next year, Brannigan two years later
The first one is okay, but no more than that. Don’t remember much of the second, apart from a brawl in … a pub
He was not born to make cop thrillers, the West was his habitad
I don’t know how Cahill would’ve worked if they had sticked to these original plans. A marshall with kids who miss their daddy isn’t exactly your regular western stuff, and the film suffers from it. As a western it works best when Wayne, Neville and Kennedy just do their thing. It’s not great by any standard.
At first Wayne should have chosen a better director and not his old pal’s son.
I’m still puzzled why Wayne made after his True Grit success all these not so good westerns (some of them look like b-pictures) instead of being a bit more selective. The only ones with an original story are The Cowboys and The Shootist, both westerns with a farewell theme which suits his age.
Of the others only Rio Lobo and Big Jake are good, but also not on the level of most of his 60s westerns. And 7 more films (5 westerns) he made between True Grit and The Shootist are forgettable.
Which also reminds me that he made in the hightime of the classic western (the 50s), when he was not too old, between Rio Grande (1950) and Rio Bravo (1959) only 2 westerns.
From the fifties on, he was always at odds with the things Hollywood was doing with westerns. Bizarre if you realize that he was the most popular western actor of them all.
In the fifties the emphasis was on psychological westerns and town westerns that were very critical about the community (High Noon, 3.10 to Yuma, Warlock), in neither of these types of movies he seemd to fit. Rio Bravo was a reaction, so it’s always said, to High Noon, to sheriff Will Kane begging for help and getting none. Mann used Stewart and Cooper instead of Wayne (and I can’t imagine him in a Mann western).
Liberty Valence set the tone (along with Ride the High Country) for the kind of westerns that would become very popular, the westerns about the end of the West, but apparently he wanted to make other westerns. This theme wasn’t his. Only The Shootist is an End of the West western, Big Jake is more a tongue-in-cheek post western, it doesn’t have the typical elegiac tone. Moreover directors like Peckinpah, Siegel, Penn, Aldrich, Hill preferred to work with other actors, and I think he didn’t want to work with them (well, Siegel … he would make The Shootist with him). Although some of his westerns are pretty violent (especially Big Jake and The Cowboys), he was appalled by the violence-drenched nature of many modern westerns.
Moreover he was working, in the sixties, when it was a good time to make westerns, on his own propaganda oeuvre with The Alamo and The Green Berets. The last movie was very time-absorbing, there were three years between inception and completion. True Grit gave him new popularity, but it was difficult to cash in on the success. He was an old man and far from healthy, and westerns consume a lot of energy. But yes, he could have been more selective. I read somewhere: ‘In the seventies The Duke was still making B-westerns, while his fans expected better from him’.