Background
An audacious change of pace for Corbucci following the madness of Django and comic strip action of Navajo Joe, The Hellbenders, an anti-racist, anti-militarist diatribe, is a cross between a mission/heist movie (will they deliver the cash-laden hearse to the rebels?) and a lamentation of the South’s fate following the Civil War. Jonas and his three sons are used throughout to represent different aspects of the Confederacy (greed, compassion, jealousy, racism) while the coffin and the mock deceased jokingly stands for the South itself (hoping one day to ‘rise again’). Even more disrespectfully, Corbucci has the dead soldier’s wife impersonated by a prostitute.
The best performance of the film obviously comes from the evertalented Joseph Cotten. Formerly of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre Project, and involved in milestones such as Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Third Man (1949), Cotten must have wondered what the hell had happened when he found himself in Spain making Spaghetti Westerns. Jonas is the most complex character in the movie, completely besotted with ‘the cause’ and blind to the disintegration of his clan. Cotten’s haggard portrayal is completely convincing. Astoundingly, it was Cotten’s second foray into Spaghettis. The Hellbenders was the sequel to The Tramplers (1966), which also starred Cotten as an ex-Confederate – the flamboyantly named Temple Cordine, head of the Cordine clan, who distributes justice by lynching anyone who doesn’t agree with his racist, redundant views. In both films, Cotten’s character is opposed by one of his sons, who tries unsuccessfully to make him change his ways.
So, what are the main things that The Hellbenders has going for it? Corbucci’s sense of the bizarre, for one thing, as well as Morricone’s mournful ‘Death of the South’ trumpet score and a cruel twist at the tale’s end. The premise of the coffin containing a dead soldier, but really brimming with stolen cash, was an idea borrowed from Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but Corbucci uses it in a completely original way – Corbucci’s hearse is actually the same Confederate ambulance prop from Leone’s film. The riverside robbery that descends into a massacre at the beginning of The Hellbenders is the only recognisably Corbucci-esque moment, the rest of the movie consisting of the family’s efforts to trick their way past various groups – a posse, the army, some bandits, a priest and the Indians. These encounters are filled with tension, but tension is not what the director does best, nor what his audiences expect. In a macabre joke, Corbucci even has Jonas and his hearse encounter one of the dead hero’s old comrades (now on pension), but he turns out to be blind and so can’t identify Clare as an impostor. Cotten made one further Spaghetti called White Comanche (1968), which starred another unexpected Anglo refugee – William Shatner, who’d just appeared in the Star Trek TV series and must have thought he’d really reached the final frontier when he landed in dusty Spain.
The Verdict
The presence of Cotten makes this watchable, but the number of rip-offs released hot on the heels of The Hellbenders (none) gives a fair idea of its impact on the Spaghetti-Western craze.
The Big Gundown (1967)
Directed by: Sergio Sollima
Music by: Ennio Morricone
Cast: Lee Van Cleef (Jonathan Corbett), Tomas Milian (Cuchillo Sanchez), Walter Barnes (Brokston), Nieves Navarro (Widow),
Fernando Sancho (Captain Segura)
102 minutes
Story
Ex-lawman turned bounty hunter Jonathan Corbett is hired by rich Texan railroad tycoon Brokston to track down a Mexican renegade called Cuchillo Sanchez. Nicknamed ‘Sanchez the Knife’, he has allegedly raped and murdered a 12-year-old white girl. Made an ‘honorary deputy’, Corbett pursues the Mexican across Texas, but his prey outwits him at every turn, hiding out with a group of Mormons and later at a ranch ruled by the whip of the sadomasochistic ‘Widow’. Cuchillo escapes into Mexico, sheltering at a monastery, and eventually makes it back to his wife in his home town. Corbett tracks him there, but Cuchillo slips through his fingers again, whereupon Brokston, the Baron (his Austrian henchman) and Brokston’s son-in-law arrive and recruit a posse of Mexican rancheros. They flush Cuchillo out of the sugar-cane fields and corner him in the desert. But in the final reckoning it transpires that the real murderer is Brokston’s son-in-law – the manhunt has been an elaborate ruse to leave the Brokston name unblemished. In a duel, Cuchillo kills the real culprit, whilst Corbett guns down the Baron and Brokston. The posse, seeing justice done, disband. Corbett and Cuchillo go their separate ways, each having learnt that wealth and power count for more in the West than the law, but that sometimes the truth can prevail.
Background
The Big Gundown is one of the finest Spaghettis ever made, but unfortunately, like so many, it is only available in English in cruelly abridged versions (95 and 85 minutes respectively). Both versions remove much of the early and middle sections of the chase, including editing the beautifully constructed opening duel when Corbett nails three bank robbers. The original story was written by political scenarist Franco Solinas. In this version, the lawman (a younger man) ended up killing his aged quarry without realising the truth. Sollima reversed the characters’ ages and threw in some troubling subject matter, which inevitably led to censorship problems – in the 85-minute version no reference is made to the young girl’s rape. Sollima also changed the ending to Solinas’s story (making it more upbeat) and cast Van Cleef as the lawman (hot on the heels of his success in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and Tomas Milian, a Cuban ex-pat, as his younger, wily adversary. The film also adds a touch of satire, with bounty hunter Corbett harbouring political ambitions to become a senator.
The Big Gundown borrowed extensively from previous Westerns (Cuchillo’s knife-throwing skill is straight out of The Magnificent Seven, the crooked railroad magnate is a B-Western standard) but reassembled them so as to seem totally original. Consequently, The Big Gundown is equal to Leone’s films, but many Western fans have never even heard of it, let alone seen it. By contrasting the two protagonists (a believer in the law and a tearaway rebel), Sollima was making subtle political observations without resorting to (a) setting his film during the Mexican Revolution or (b) getting bogged down in a chin-stroking political debate. The points being made, though simplistic (poor, exploited peasantry equals ‘good’, rich tycoon equals ‘bad’), are the same points that several more lauded Italian political films have made, but The Big Gundown is far more entertaining. Poor Cuchillo is even despised by his own people. The Mexican rancheros that Brokston recruits are happy to catch the peon, as he was once a revolutionary who sided with Juarez in the Mexican Revolution.
Van Cleef and Milian give career-best performances, both eliciting a degree of humanity from their good but duped characters. Other turns of note are Nieves Navarro as the wicked ‘Widow’, who puts Cuchillo in a pen with a wild bull, Walter Barnes as the disingenuous Brokston, a man prepared to twist the law to protect his family (and a forthcoming land deal), and Fernando Sancho, usually cast as a swaggering bandit, here portraying a Mexican officer who hates Mexican peasants and interfering Americans with equal relish. Sollima also includes some very interesting characters. Look out for an ex-gunslinger turned monk who is christened ‘Brother Smith and Wesson’ by his brethren, and the Austrian Baron, complete with monocle and no sense of humour, who has a specially designed, quick-draw holster, reinforcing his credo of ‘speed over accuracy’. Although these characters seem to be self-conscious attempts by Sollima to make his movie different from run-of-the-mill Spaghettis, the authenticity of the settings and costumes makes this one of the most convincing portrayals of the West on celluloid. Ennio Morricone’s music (including the title song ‘Run Man Run’) is a classic and is among his most popular scores. The final chase through the cane fields is one of the great Spaghetti Western set pieces, as the hounds are unleashed and Cuchillo runs for his life. After the heights of The Big Gundown, Sollima made an inferior sequel with Milian called Run Man Run (1968).
The Verdict
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br /> As good as Spaghettis get. Though a decent print is as difficult to track down as Cuchillo himself, it’s well worth the effort.
Django Kill – If You Live, Shoot! (1967)
Directed by: Giulio Questi
Music by: Ivan Vandor
Cast: Tomas Milian (The Stranger), Piero Lulli (Oaks), Roberto Camardiel (Zorro), Paco Sanz (Hagerman), Milo Quesada (Tembler)
115 minutes
Story
Two Indian mystics find a half-dying stranger in the desert and nurse him back to health. He has been left for dead by his comrades, a bandit gang led by Oaks, who have stolen a Union gold shipment. Oaks and his men arrive in a violent town and are attacked and killed by the locals, led by Tembler the saloon-keeper and Hagerman the storekeeper. The pair then split the gold between them. The Stranger and the Indians arrive and decide to track down the haul, while a Mexican rancher named Zorro and his gang are also after the cache. The violence escalates until Hagerman kills Tembler and blames it on the Stranger, after the storekeeper has buried the gold in the cemetery. Zorro captures and crucifies the Stranger (in a cell full of vampire bats), but the Stranger frees himself and defeats Zorro and his gang. Hagerman now has all the gold and hides it in a beam in his house, but the building catches fire and he dies, gilded in molten gold, leaving the Stranger to ride out with nothing.
Background
Over the years Django Kill has gained a reputation as the most violent Spaghetti Western and, though the film has tempered with age, it’s still one of the oddest genre contributions. Several filmmakers in the sixties and seventies experimented with the form of the Western, with varying degrees of success. Maverick artist Andy Warhol made Lonesome Cowboys (1968), predictably with the emphasis on transvestites, bisexuality and camp parody; Dennis Hopper made The Last Movie (1971), a loose, improvisational film deconstructing the mythology of Westerns; and Alejandro Jodorowsky made the strangest ‘Western’ of all time, El Topo (1971) – a rambling, Biblical odyssey that lampooned John Wayne, religion, mysticism and Sergio Leone in the name of ‘head-movie’ entertainment.
Questi’s Django Kill is the most recognisably Western of the bunch, though the extreme violence, mystical waffle and bizarre characters still set the film apart from Leone, Tessari et al, and even from the excesses of Sergio Corbucci.
The film is loosely based on A Fistful of Dollars (two gangs, a cache of gold, a lone stranger), but it also wanders into Edgar Allan Poe horror, Jane Eyre-inspired melodrama and dark, twisted sexuality. Like Corbucci’s Django, the two gangs in town are not your typical Western fare. The townsmen are led by Hagerman, a pious zealot (who keeps his wife locked in her bedroom with bars on the windows) and Tembler (who has a gang of self-righteous, stranger-hating toughs, who hang around his bar). The Mexicans are led by jovial, bewhiskered rancher Zorro, who has a psychic parrot and a gang of honchos (his ‘Muchachos’) dressed in identical black suits – an idea lifted wholesale from an earlier Spaghetti called Three Golden Boys (1966). Moreover, Zorro fancies his own men. These protagonists sound interesting enough (almost the ingredients for a send-up), but Questi’s unrelenting violence and complete lack of humour make this a film that takes itself far too seriously. Its unusual content was taken very seriously by the censors and it lost over 20 minutes of footage when the movie finally made it outside mainland Europe in 1970 – though many of the deletions trimmed extended dialogue scenes about the afterlife between the Stranger and his Indian companions.
But the violence, especially in the uncut version, is still disturbing. Horses are hacked with machetes and later blown to bits with dynamite (the aftermath being particularly harrowing) and the saloon-keeper’s son is sexually assaulted by Zorro’s muchachos. The Stranger’s love interest is burnt to a crisp in the Fall of the House of Usher-inspired finale, which also sees Hagerman swathed in molten gold. Among the other grotesqueries are a savage mass lynching and two scenes that for years were cut from all available versions of the film – an Indian is scalped by the townspeople (an ironic reversal of usual Western ‘etiquette’) and Oaks’s chest is torn apart during an operation, when it’s discovered he has been riddled with golden bullets. Moreover, the Stranger – after being shot and left for dead – has to endure a crucifixion (in a prison cell that vampire bats and lizards call home). Questi includes much religious imagery and mystical mumbo-jumbo about the ‘Land of the Dead’, and the whole film works as a rumination on ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell’, death and rebirth. But his style is so erratic that this film belongs in a different universe to the other Spaghetti Westerns, far closer to El Topo and Warhol’s underground cinema.
The Verdict
It’s startlingly original and magnificently photographed, but for some reason Django Kill doesn’t quite gel in the same way as Django or other less mainstream offerings. Tomas Milian (in his first starring role) is excellent as the half-breed stranger and many of the sequences are genuinely surreal (including the entrance of Oaks’s gang into town – an unsettling highlight), but this is an out-of-control, pop-art fantasy of a West that only ever existed in Questi’s delirious (but very imaginative) mind.
Death Rides a Horse (1967)
Directed by: Giulio Petroni
Music by: Ennio Morricone
Cast: Lee Van Cleef (Ryan), John Phillip Law (Bill), Luigi Pistilli (Walcott), Anthony Dawson (‘Four Aces’ Cavanaugh)
110 minutes
Story
At a lonely way station on a stormy night, an outlaw gang rob a cash shipment resting there overnight. During the raid, four members of the gang attack the ranch house, killing the owner, his wife and teenage daughter – but a fifth man saves the rancher’s little son. Fifteen years later this little boy, named Bill, has grown up and plots revenge on the outlaws. He is joined in his vendetta by mysterious gunslinger Ryan, recently released from prison, who also has a score to settle with the gang. The pair track down and kill the first bandit, Cavanaugh, who is now a respectable saloon owner. The next is Walcott, now a banker. He has been entrusted with a million dollars’ worth of public funds and the rest of the murderers are his gang. Walcott steals the money and convinces the authorities to blame Ryan (who used to be a member of Walcott’s gang, but was betrayed). Walcott hides out in the Mexican village of El Viento and eventually Ryan and Bill, with the help of the local peasants, defeat him. In the dénouement, it transpires that Ryan was present the night Bill’s family was killed and it was he who saved Bill’s life. Though Bill holds Ryan partly responsible for not stopping the massacre, he decides not to kill his partner.
Background
This was the first and most successful of a series of big-budget remakes of For a Few Dollars More. Death Rides a Horse can at least be excused accusations of plagiarism, as it was written by Luciano Vincenzoni (who scripted Leone’s film) and again starred cadaverous Van Cleef, as the older half of a pair of gunslingers who team up to catch the bandits. The connection was further stressed by the casting of Luigi Pistilli as chief villain, Walcott. Pistilli had played Groggy, a prominent member of Indio’s gang in For a Few Dollars More. For the younger hero, previously portrayed by Clint Eastwood, director Petroni cast American John Phillip Law, who remains best known for his roles as an intergalactic angel in Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy (1968) and the super-thief hero in Danger: Diabolik (1968). But, unfortunately, this casting decision is the weak link in the film, as Law is no Eastwood.
That said, the film is still impressively staged. Anyone familiar with For a Few Dollars More will enjoy recognising Petroni’s blatant emulation. Every aspect of Leone’s film is present and correct – even down to the red-tinted flashbacks to the night of horror, the uneasy partnership between young and old, a prison break (using a locomotive instead of dynamite) and the final, apocalyptic shootout in a Mexican village (very reminiscent of The Magnificent Seven). Death Rides a Horse also marked a shift in the role of the villains and was the first Spaghetti to pit Van Cleef against a bunch of outlaws who have adopted masks of r
espectability. Here the villains have used their ill-gotten gains to set themselves up as ‘righteous men’ and Van Cleef must oust them from power before dealing with them in his own inimitable way (i.e. shooting them to pieces). This theme permeated all Van Cleef’s subsequent sixties Westerns.
Death Rides a Horse is violent (especially the opening sequence) and Ennio Morricone’s harsh, chanted score emphasises this – the riding theme was reused in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003). At one point Law is buried up to his neck in sand, has salt pushed in his mouth and is left to die in the desert, while in another scene he is tortured by having his head trapped in a huge grain press. Not to be outdone, Van Cleef gets badly beaten up by the bandits before getting his revenge. Even stranger, however, was the fact that, despite such savagery, the film was released uncut outside Europe in 1969. The other main villain was played by British actor Anthony Dawson, who had played the killer hired by Ray Milland to bump off his wife (Grace Kelly) in Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1953) and also had small roles in three James Bond movies – Dr No (1962), From Russia With Love (1963) and Thunderball (1965). In Death Rides a Horse he played ‘Four Aces’ Cavanaugh, so called because of the distinctive four ace playing cards tattooed on his chest.
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