I don’t remember too much voiceover, hm… I loved the fact that that it was grim and without humor 
Last western I watched was The Spoilers with Anne Baxter and Jeff Chandler.
Yes, a surrealist classic.
I liked the strange looking riding scenes, with the camera on the “horses” against a studio background. And the always ridiculous looking special effects.
What I don’t understand is those scenes against the blue screen when there is absolutely no reason for the use of the blue screen. One moment we’re on location, people are talking to each other, doing nothing spcial, the next moment we get the continuation of the sequence (and the conversation), but the scene is not shot on location, but in the studio, against a blue screen. Doesn’t happen once, but several times.
I noticed that too. Maybe they re-shot a lot after they left the set.
It maybe was a troubled production, and at least I think I read somewhere that it was heavily cut. And it looks strangely cut in places.
But it is not Blue Screen, it is simple rear projection. Or not?
Blue Screen was probably used for the last scenes in the gold canyon.
Maybe rear projection then, but still the same remark: I don’t get it. They shot a scene on location, and then for the next scene, supposedly on the same location, they use a rear projection. Weird.
Some of the best westerns from the fifties have scenes shot in the studio (especially night scenes, cowboys aroud the camp fire!), and I don’t really mind those scenes, but here they were really disorienting. I don’t remember that I noticed them back then, when I saw the movie in cinema, but all things were - or at least - felt different then.
Yes, I read somewhere that the original running-time was close to three hours. Maybe they had cut scenes with dialogue parts that were - according to the film makers - essential and therefore had to shoot and insert some extra scenes to pick up these dialogue snippets, I don’t know.
The film’s eponymous dark valley is actually called Schnalstal (Val Senales), located in the Italian Alps, near the Austrian border, approximately thirty kilometers (about nineteen miles) northwest of Meran (Merano), in South Tyrol (Alto Adige), Italy. At the time of the movie’s setting, late nineteenth century, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the end of the First World War it became Italian territory.
I would call the villagers in The Dark Valley rather Tyroleans or Austrians than Germans. The language spoken in the film is Austro-Bavarian, a German variety, quite hard to understand even for native German speakers. Watching the movie on DVD with Berliner friends turned out to be a stop-and-go experience: pause, explain/translate, continue. (Ah, I forgot to mention that I was born in Innsbruck, Tyrol.) In particular Luzi’s voice-over narration proved to be problematic. The actress (or actor, depending on your stance on gender-neutral language) who portrays Luzi, Paula Beer, is German, by the way, born in Berlin. I don’t know whether she adopted the Tyrolean accent specifically for The Dark Valley or picked it up during skiing vacations in the Alps; maybe her voice was replaced.
Did you watch the English dub or the German original?
Exactly. I felt the same way when I saw it for the first time two years ago: sort of pleasantly surprised that director Andreas Prochaska had avoided postmodern (self-)referentiality – “Hello, Silenzio!” –, smart-alecky conversations and any comic relief whatsoever.
@Admin Was it difficult for you to understand the dialogue?
That’s not very likely imo. They wouldn’t cut the film in a way that re-shooting is necessary. Only if they thought it was necessary to change the dialogue after shooting was completed.
But even then they would simply have red-dubbed the parts.
One possible reason could be that some of the shot film was not usable due to technical problems. That happened with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. One camera was out of focus, which wasn’t noticed for a week, until the first dailies were viewed.
But then it happened throughout the whole film.
Actually I can’t remember another film with such permanent changes between on-location and rear projection shots within one scene.
But MacKenna’s Gold is full of things which are a bit difficult to explain.
Neither can I.
And yes, it’s hard to understand how anybody could ruin this movie almost completely. The story is of course a bit old-fashioned, but the Italians made excellent films with treasure maps, and with this cast they should’ve produced at least a decent adventure movie. It’s often said that they wanted to make a sort of Guns of Navarone in western setting, and therefore filmed the movie in the style of a bygone era, but those war-adventure movies like Navarone are way better than this movie.
Nope, I’m from Bavaria, grew up 10 minutes from the Austrian borer, I felt quite at home with this movie
Watched
- Bone Tomahawk (strange but ultimately satisfying western)
- The Command (1954) not bad
- Gunfight at OK Corral (great but not historically accurate)
Dirty Little Billy.
Perfect role for Michael J Pollard this one, even though not found of the characters in the film, its still an interesting watch. Low key and full of characters who are just down right low and dirty. Nice to see a widescreen print at last for this one anyway.
So did I, for better or for worse.
English dub. I definitely would have gone for German audio/English subs had the option been there. I’d always prefer to watch a film in the language native to its setting if possible (hence spags being pretty-much the only non-English language productions where I prefer the dub), and I will certainly seek out the original audio when I get around to giving The Dark Valley that all-important second look somewhere down the line (I didn’t especially care or it but it wasn’t “Never again!” bad; it wasn’t Mamma Mia! or Transformers 2 or The Other Woman 
).
I think I may have misrepresented myself in citing the movie as “grim” and “humourless”. Like most of us, I likes my westerns on the grim side (which is likely what has drawn us to the Italian westerns as opposed to their Golden-Age Hollywood counterparts), and I have precious little love for the decidedly more jovial post-Trinity spags of the early seventies. But I think that, for me, The Dark Valley wasn’t just tonally grim (although it was that), but the characters themselves and their motivations for acting as pitiless as they were seemed overly one-note. To me, anyway.
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Red River (1948)
- Howard Hawks -
Some say that the abrupt change of tone at the end of this movie, when tragedy turns into farce, is clever joke on machism and western mythology, and is in spirit of Hawks’ later famous western-comedies. Other would say that this movie simply has flaws. For example, John Ireland’s character is very strongly and ominously introduced in the movie, only to later be dismissed and forgotten. Scene in which he and Montgomery Clift try each other’s pistols, is one of the most blatantly homoerotic moments in classic western.
Well, haven’t seen many westerns lately, but i surely have seen HATEFUL EIGHT. And for me it’s the best Tarantino movie ever. I was really really satisfied by it, which, unfortunately haven’t happened with his two previous movies.
It is really fascinating how different The H8ful 8 is estimated. Especially by those who have strong feelings towards QT in either a positive or negative way.
Okay i admit, Django and Basterds aren’t bad, but what i disliked about them was the finale. In both cases, it just could have been a lot better than it was.
SHOOT OUT - The film was pretty dull as nothing really exciting was happening most of the time and Gregory Peck didn’t seem to fit very well in the leading role, but avengers that have just been released out of prison taking care of orphans for 1 hour do not fit well either. Disappointing, I was expecting something more grim for a '71 western.