When the Devil Holds a Gun / Una colt in mano al diavolo (Gianfranco Baldanello, 1973)

Good news re the english dub, will have to see if I can track a copy down.

I missed it on movies4men a second time! I really need to check the TV guide in future.

Iā€™m also after a DVD-R if anybody recorded it.

Luigi Mannoia should be credited in Gun Shy Piluk, but I donā€™t have the movie yet.


Look whoā€™s on the left in this pic from Lattanziā€™s Tiger From River Kwai. :slight_smile:

Not in the fandub of the French dvd I have. The only western that I know he is credited for sure, besides Six Bounty Killers, is I quattro pistoleri di Santa TrinitĆ , in which the actor I asked about has a very small role. And speaking of Six Bounty Killers, thatā€™s Lord isnā€™t it?

Itā€™s him. Thatā€™s interesting, in the Italian credits of Six Bounty Killers are listed 20 actors including Fiorella and Maurizio but not their father Luigi. Moreover, no closing credits in my copy of Four Gunmen of the Holy Trinity! Is Filippo Antonelli also listed in them? Iā€™m asking because I found a guy with a familiar face whoā€™s in both The Stranger Returns and The Tiger from the River Kwai, but probably not in Four Gunmen.

Youā€™re right, Donā€™t know what I was looking at :slight_frown: Closing credits for 4 Gunmen

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Or maybe itā€™s him on the right next to Giglio Gigli?

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IMO itā€™s the same guy. Unfortunately right after your screen they ride toward the camera but in the fullscreen version the outside riders disappear. I think this actor is in a Fidani or 2.

Taped this one tonight. :slight_smile:

Watched the full length version in English from a recent upload. Not great, but itā€™s a solid ā€˜spaghā€™ that manages to entertain nevertheless, besides I liked Robert Woods and William Berger in this. So yeah, there you go.

Agree with Lone Gringo on his thoughts on this one. Nice to see no comedy in a 70ā€™s Spaghetti, and yes Woods is pretty cool in this. He does his job in laid back style. Nice to see the full length english version .

My ā€œrestoredā€ DVD has 9 short passages totalling around 3.15 minutes with low VHS-quality and otherwise 74 minutes fine image quality. I didnā€™t know about this before watching it today and such things tend to affect my appreciation of the film.

I bought it mainly for Robert Woods and William Berger and the Black Jack(7/10) director Baldanello. Woods is OK but Berger looks not so good here. The absence of comedy is a plus. Crime theme in a SW is not, even if I didnā€™t find it so pronounced.
This SW feels like a typical 5-6/10 that will take at least one more view to decide the verdict.

Thatā€™s a very old fan made edit youā€™re referring to ā€¦ absolutely horrible VHS, but at the time all that was available.
The full length movie plays on the Sony Action Channel, formerly Movies4men ā€¦ in very nice quality with an English soundtrack. Not a bad little movie, considering itā€™s tiny budget.

Trivia courtesy of Robert Woods: Watch out for the red haired teenager who plays a stable boy; he has no dialogue, so technically an extra ā€¦ itā€™s the infamous John Paul Getty III, who would later be kidnapped in Rome and tortured by his captors, who cut off his right ear, to show they meant business.
Woods told me that the cast and crew all knew who he was, but were told to keep quiet in case there was any type of incident.

Having watched When The Devil Holds A Gun/Colt In The Hand Of The Devil (Gianfranco Baldanello) for the second time I followed the plot more in detail which was necessary to understand the detective work element better.

Now this SW feels comparable to Death at Owell Rock (Riccardo Freda) (6/10) but with a more complex riddle to solve and on the other hand there was another twist regarding the ā€œdetectivesā€ themselves in the latter SW.
Robert Woods versus Mark Damon are also rather even in these two cases.

When the antihero was to face the slimy George Wang character I was reminded of Yankee where also a rather odd villain was profiled by another actor. Here Wang looked like a well known Swedish author etc (Jan Guillou), like a hun :slight_smile:

The music in this SW was not pronounced and not so good.
But overall I found it entertaining enough to be 6/10 rated, but its not a film I will want to watch many times in a short period say within a year, and there is much more ā€œcompetetionā€ nowadays (from other 78 SWs on my Top 79).

54 Tequila Joe/Time And Place For Killing (Enzo Dellā€™Aquila) music Francesco De Masi
55 The Unholy Four/Chuck Moll (Enzo Barboni)
56 When The Devil Holds A Gun/Colt In The Hand Of The Devil (Gianfranco Baldanello)
57 Death at Owell Rock (Riccardo Freda)
58 Pecos Cleans Up (Maurizio Lucidi) music Coriolano Gori

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