The start of the Yankee is weaker, a lot of minutes are spent on riding scenes and vain talk, and there’s too much Leone-imitating zooms. Yet, somewhere in the middle, from a superbly directed one-against-all battle scene in the ruins of an old village, it becomes a much more solid film and keeps that level to the end.
If you consider the context, that it is an Italian film, it is not difficult to recognize the motives. Concho ruling over a remote rural area like a Roman emperor controlling everything that is happening clearly symbolizes the most (in)famous plague of modern Italian society - the mafia. Concho is the undisputed ruler of his territory, the official authority - the sheriff - is puppet, subject to Concho. In his entourage are also a philosopher, a painter, etc., symbols of the infiltration of the mafia into all pores of society, corruption that goes from workers to intellectuals. The fact that Concho’s throne is in an abandoned church is also not accidental, it is a comment on the connection of the Mafia with the Church. After townspeople anger Concho his punishment is horrible, he sets fire to the whole town as a warning. The only one who can oppose Concho and disrupt such a structure is a mysterious outsider. He has no personal motives (other than a prosaic desire to make money), no score from the past that he has to settle with Concho. We learn nothing about his past during the film, nor the future that awaits him. He is simply a symbol of an external force that purifies a corrupt society. Modeled after Shane’s prototype, but cynical like Eastwood’s Man With No Name, at the end of the film without pardon he takes all the government gold that Concho tried to steal for himself and rides off in the sunset (there’s no way the protagonist of American western would do that - taking of the gold part, not riding off in the sunset).
It can be seen that Brass invested a lot more heart in the second part of the film (which can probably be explained by alleged producer’s intervention in his ideas), especially in action scenes that have a lot of attractive camera work. Philippe Leroy is OK in the title role (there have been a lot of worse lead roles in spaghettis), and Adolfo Celi is great as a Bond-style I’ll-kill-you-later-after-we-play-this-game villain. However, it should be said that the film is not too original. It is yet another spaghetti western with a story taken from Fistful of Dollars. Some things are thrown out (no 2 gangs, only 1, no family with which we empathize), but there’s the gravedigger and the boy again. The stripping down doesn’t help the plot, it won’t be overly intriguing to anyone who won’t look for the subtext.