What a great movie is this! It will surely pleaseantly surprise more experienced viewers who are already accustomed to not so good direction. I saw this for the first time when I had seen about 150 sw and wow Vengeance indeed was among the best looking of them all.
Margheriti did an excellent job and put a lot of work to make it look good. It is a low budget movie, hardly any Spain but you wont probably notice that since the most of the movie takes place in a fine looking interiors. It has such a great atmosphere, great jazzy music + classical spanish guitar music. It is gritty and Harrison is tough mf. His eyes are esp. threating. I just thought the movie loses breath at the end.
The last 20 minutes drag a little. The final duel in a mine is ok though and feels like it is a fight between a man and a devil. On the second view it does not get better but I’d still say it must be better than And God Said to Cain which I was not even able to sit through for how boring it was (and Kinski is the most unlikeable sw hero)!
I tend to agree but maybe I like Vengeance slightly more and give it a weak 6/10. There are some other focused revenge SWs in a similar league, for example El Rojo (Leopoldo Savona) also starring Richard Harrison although its mood is not quite as dark. Wrath of God (Alberto Cardone), Revenge for Revenge (Mario Colucci) and Vengeance Is My Forgiveness (Roberto Mauri) are other examples (all 6/10).
More sofisticated revenge SWs IMO are Death Sentence (Mario Lanfranchi), Black Jack (Gianfranco Baldanello), Hate Thy Neighbor (Ferdinando Baldi) and Django The Last Killer (Giuseppe Vari) (all 7/10),
and especially The Great Silence (Sergio Corbuccio), Django Prepare A Coffin (Ferdinando Baldi), Dead Men Ride (Aldo Florio), Requiem For A Gringo and the “ultimate” revenge SW Cemetery Without Crosses (Robert Hossein) (all 8/10)
Vengeance is more one-dimensional. Rather well performed but not so special. Richard Harrison is not bad here and the Claudio Camaso character is nice to look at - a more sophisticated version of the wild man in Garter Golt
The music by Carlo Savina obviously was partly re-used in Hey Amigo, You’re Dead (Paolo Bianchini) which is another sort of revenge movie I rank higher than Vengeance, still 6/10.
72 Vengeance Is Mine/$100,000 for a Killing (Giovanni Fago) 1967
73 Death Played the Flute /Requiem For A Bounty Killer/Requiem for a Bounty Hunter (Angelo Pannaccio) 1972 74 Vengeance (Antonio Margheriti ) 1968
75 And the Crows Will Dig Your Grave (Juan Bosch) music Bruno Nicolai 1971
76 El Rojo (Leopoldo Savona) 1966
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