I Saw A Film!

French acted spaghetti western of spectacular moody gunfighter drama. The caption read something about fetish, and I had to watch twice before I realized it was about his black glove on his hammer-fanning hand (not what I was thinking). At one point winning a confrontation just by putting his glove on. The film moves a bit slowly, but there’s enough intimidation and shooting to keep us on track for the revenge and then kidnapping story.

The direction is top notch, moody close-ups, exciting riding in black and white and color, and great desert backdrops, and really fun nearly impossible gunfighter feats of prowess. You really can be brought back to the fascination with the American West setting. There’s even a sequence of character development for our moody anti-hero as he eats at huge table of dirty ranchers and gun-slingers. Someone has left a can of mustard close to him, as he opens it, it’s a joke, a spring loaded jack-in-the-box erupts and sets the room shaking with laughter. Our man nods and smiles, handling the prank with maturity. For a while I thought the Lee Burton antagonist was Cameron Mitchell, could be a brother.

As is often the case, strategy often falls apart, and we’re left with some rough old world cruelty, though for people who were used to watching the world hang each other in person, what was cruel was probably only that there weren’t enough baths. A rough death was to be expected, abuse of women hardly worth mentioning.

This is running free on Prime (USA) and marks an age of maturing Western stories with less lily white heroics. Things are dirty, miserable and mostly avoidable if folks weren’t so stubborn.