Pretty decent revenge western boasting a couple of superb set pieces. No wonder Clint Eastwood made the decision to play down the emotions on The Man with No Name, because this is a good example of how pop-eyed emotions can get when restraint is missing especially when you’ve got Henry Silva in the mix. The lead Thomas Hunter is not, as you came to expect in spaghetti westerns, an Italian dude anglicizing his name, but a genuine Yank, heading to Europe to further his career whereas Hollywood veteran Dan Duryea is extending his. Bonus of an Ennio Morricone score.
A pair of Johnny Rebs, making off with Unionist loot, at the end of the Civil War, make an unusual pact. One, Jerry Brewster (Thomas Hunter), takes the rap for the heist, while his partner Ken Seagull (Nando Gazzallo) the other makes off with the loot, promising, as part of the deal, to look after his buddy’s wife and child. Five years later, the freed Jerry returns home to find his pal’s reneged on the deal, wife is dead, son Tim an orphan, and Ken, now a wealthy rancher, is more intent on muscling up and eliminating his rival than keeping to his side of the bargain.
Jerry teams up with drifter Winny Getz (Dan Duryea) who gets himself a job on the ranch where tough foreman Garcia (Henry Silva) enjoys handing out beatings. There’s a smidgeon of nascent romance, not enough to get in the way of the action, when Ken’s sister Mary Ann (Nicoletta Machiavelli) takes pity on the roughed-up Jerry.
But let’s cut to the chase. There’s a brilliant ambush by Ken’s rivals. His high-handed methods have upset the townspeople and other ranchers. So with the help of our hero they ambush Ken’s cowboys herd horses through a canyon by rolling down on them rolls of tumbleweed set aflame, decimating the cowboys by picking them off from the cliffs.
At the end a two-man army of Jerry and Winny (make it a two-and-a-half-man-army if we count in Tim, no mean shakes with a catapult) takes on a regiment of Garcia’s thugs in the town, fighting them on the rooftops and the streets, with the help of sticks of dynamite. This is tremendous stuff. I watched it immediately after seeing Dillinger (1973) and noted that I had automatically accorded the John Milius gangster picture top marks for the various shoot-outs whereas I was so used to shoot-outs in westerns that the tendency was to write them off. Whereas, this one, in particular, was easily on a par with the Milius, better in some ways because the two heroes had to be a good bit more inventive to outwit the enemy.
The climax at the ranch between Jerry and Ken is also well done, the pair employing clever tricks, and half the scene taking place in darkness.
The pace never lets up. The action is constant. Good plans become undone by spies. Saloons are wrecked. There are punch-ups and shoot-outs galore and some excellent lines and neat situations such as when the prison guards steal Jerry’s dough on release and send him off minus his gun.
Nobody who wasn’t already a star made much marquee headway from this and largely it’s been viewed as a western programmer, slotted into the lower half of a double bill, and largely forgotten. But perhaps because there’s no star requiring special treatment with slick lines and a denoted love interest and the kind of scene that always seems written just to give a big star a big moment, this falls into the leaner category, where the story is kept simple, the action continuous and whatever genuine emotion we require is limited to loss (of wife) and recovery (of son).
That still leaves room for Garcia to put on a whole show for himself and Winny to underplay him at every turn.
Thomas Hunter (The Magnificent Tony Carrera, 1968) might surprise in not offering the Yank equivalent of the traditional British upper lip, but sometimes we do under-do things by limiting male emotion, so you could view this as some kind of breakthrough for the incontinently emotional man. Henry Silva (Johnny Cool, 1963), with no restraint applied, just lets rip. Dan Duryea (Five Golden Dragons, 1967), in his last important role, enjoys a last hurrah.
Carlo Lizzani (The Violent Four, 1968) directs from a script by Piero Regnoli (Matchless, 1964).
Worth a look. Reassessment long overdue. What they used to call a rip-roaring western.
Virtually every film by British director Michael Winner was either despised or under-rated. Sure, he appeared at the wrong time, when critics were in the thrall of such stylists as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Arthur Penn and Steven Spielberg, guys who couldn’t tell a story without adding something distinctive and individual. It didn’t help that Winner came across as cocky and arrogant and chewed on cigars as if he was Orson Welles. His copybook was eternally blotted after Death Wish (1974) and possibly before then for consorting with the likes of Charles Bronson who did not fit the critical palette in terms of a western hero.
So I’ve come out swinging big-style for this extraordinary number for its moral complexity and revisionism. It doesn’t exactly turn the genre on its head but it’s the most honest and realistic western you’ll come across and with rasping dialogue where every word counts. Sheriff Cotton Ryan (Robert Ryan) is a coward, bought and sold by local rancher Vincent Bronson (Lee J. Cobb). Old flame Laura (Sheree North) is willing to jump into bed with the titular lawman Jared Maddox (Burt Lancaster) to save her partner Hurd Price (J.D. Cannon) and just as likely to bed Maddox anyway out of pure lust. But then she’s just as likely to feel sorry for one Maddox’s captives, Vernon (Robert Duvall), and sneak him out a gun and endanger her old lover.
Price and Laura had such a miserable spread and are such poor farmers, hooked by a dream that needs more than dreaming to turn it into a reality, that any crops they raise only feed the weevils. On the other hand Bronson, unlike the ranchers in other westerns, doesn’t want to posse up and hunt down the lawman. His skill set errs on the side of negotiation, bribery and blackmail. The young gunslinger Crowe (Richard Jordan) doesn’t end up, as usual for the genre, as easy meat.
Whenever John Wayne set off to right a wrong he generally had the audience on his side. The injustice committed against him, or that was walking into, was clear.
There’s nothing clear about who murdered an old man in Maddox’s home town of Bannock. It was an accident, or the kind of accident you get when a bunch of drunken outlaws shoot up a town. No idea who fired the fatal bullet. It could anyone out of seven visitors. We don’t even find out anything about the victim. He’s little more than a MacGuffin.
And Maddox isn’t vengeance on a horse. He’s not out to kill anyone. He doesn’t know who to blame for the murder, his job is just to round up the suspects. However, the wanted don’t take too kindly to being on his wanted list and a couple of them, namely Vernon and Bronson’s son Jason (John Beck) are itching to put a bullet through the lawman’s head, by fair means or foul, via the traditional shootout in main street or as conveniently the bullet in the back or the trail ambush.
Maddox is implacable. “A lawman is a killer of men. That’s what the job calls for.” Even though he agrees his task is a murky one, and little chance of divining the actual killer, and even the possibility that for lack of such clarity the judge hearing the case will simply let everyone off, he’s still obsessed with doing what needs done, rounding up the suspects, killing them if need be if they oppose the rule of law.
The townspeople aren’t much help, up in arms at the prospect of a widow-maker in their midst, and not keen on the law being enforced when their own lawman takes such a different view. Cotton Tyan, at one point, was a good and feared lawman. But those days are long past. “Everyone remembers Fort Bliss,” he mutters ruefully before reeling off the list of his failures.
As I mentioned the dialog is superb. No room for banter or repartee here. Every word comes with a hammer behind it.
“I ain’t afraid of him,” remonstrates wannabe gunslinger Crowe. “You would be,” retorts Ryan, “if you had brains enough to spit.”
To prevent Hurd from leaving Laura pleads, “But Maddox promised nothing would happen to you.” Hurd snaps, “But what did you promise him?”
Saloon owner Lucas (Joseph Wiseman), with whom Maddox has history, challenges his approach. “You’re wrong here.” “Not from where I stand,” says Maddox. “You can’t see from where you stand.”
Although Winner is too fond of a recent technological innovation, the zoom shot, the rest of the filming, like the tale itself, is somber. There are some nice touches. We are introduced to Maddox as he towers above the camera. And it’s only when the camera changes angle that we realize the load on his packhorse is actually a corpse.
I’ve never seen a western where anyone, despite riding through endless barren plains, is covered in dust. But here, Maddox’s eyes have a patina of dust. Ryan uses a horseshoe as a paperweight. His town is largely crime free because it lacks a railhead. Like a Henry Hathaway western, we get a good idea of the makeup of the town from signs on buildings.
The action scenes are terrific. Killing a man’s horse in the wilderness is as good as killing the man. The only time Ryan chips in is to help arrest someone committing crime in his own town, and in that section he and Maddox work as a team communication through nods and gestures.
The ending, had it gone to plan, would have turned the genre on its head, Maddox deciding he’s done enough killing and planning to leave without making any further arrests. But that’s not good enough for Jason, who has something to prove and dies because of it.
Bronson, who’s done his best to avoid outright conflict, also dies, by his own hand, unable to deal with the death of his only remaining son.
Michael Winner (The Nightcomers, 1972) knows he’s dealing with a western icon in Burt Lancaster (The Professionals, 1966) and allows the actor to add another iconic character to his portfolio and trigger the more thoughtful screen persona he would evince in the next two in his “western trilogy” Valdez Is Coming (1971) and Ulzana’s Raid (1972), each successively nudging closer and closer to outright revisionism.
Inveterate tough guy Robert Ryan (The Wild Bunch, 1969) plays mostly against type as the worn-outlawman seeking an easy life. Sheree North (The Gypsy Moths, 1969) makes the most of an unglamorous, conflicted, role. Based on this performance, you wouldn’t figure Robert Duvall on turning into a quiet gangster’s lawyer the following year in The Godfather.
Making his big screen debut is Richard Jordan (Valdez Is Coming, 1971) and on his sophomore appearance is John Beck (The Other Side of Midnight, 1977).
What a debut by screenwriter Gerald Wilson (Chato’s Land, 1972).
Coming to this in reverse order after watching Lancaster in Valdez is Coming and Ulzana’s Raid (1972) and after reappraising Winner following The Nightcomers, I had no idea what to expect. Least of all that I would be so impressed I’d watch it twice straight through.
It’s a risky business for an established star to change their screen persona. The only reason they’ve achieved stardom is because there’s something appealing and even comforting about the persona they’ve adopted. Audiences queue up to see a screen favorite because they know what they’re getting. That still leaves room for chameleons like Dustin Hoffman, whose appeal is the exact opposite, moviegoers don’t know what they’re going to get from one movie to the next.
James Garner (Buddwing, 1966) had a curious screen persona. Sure, he was laid-back and his delivery involved a drawl but his persona, drawn from the scallywag Maverick (1957-1962), also included an element of the sneaky. He wasn’t always as straightforward or heroic (The Americanization of Emily, 1964) as you might expect, but that made him comfortably different.
But it’s one thing to make minor changes to your screen persona, it’s another to dump it completely. Even his combed-back hairstyle is gone as well as the rest of his screen persona as he leans into the sneaky part. He’s an outlaw. And not charming like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and not hawking around a code of honor like The Wild Bunch (1969) and not a bad guy doing good for whatever reason. His only one redemptive feature is that he’s fallen in love.
On the other hand, if you’re going to play a villain, you better be a smart one, capable of shooting your way out of tricky situations, clever enough to outfox the authorities and able to come up with a plan to steal $300,000 in gold dust from the biggest and most secure safe ever build in the strongest stronghold you could find.
In short order, we are introduced to Luther Sledge (James Garner) robbing a stage, meeting up with girlfriend Ria (Laura Antonelli) and being ambushed in a saloon by gamblers who don’t like losing. Making good his escape, he comes across the Old Man (John Marley) who suggests the unthinkable, stealing the gold. The obvious method would be taking the gold when it’s being transported from the gold mine to the safe.
But it travels with a heck of a guard, more or less a small army, drilled to perfection, armed to the teeth. So, Sledge resorts to the inside job routine. Only problem is the stronghold is actually a prison with 500 prisoners and the safe is inside the maximum security section. Even so, the Old Man, whose done time there, reckons he has listened often enough to the tumblers on the safe being turned that they won’t need to resort to dynamite and the like.
Sledge gets his buddy Erwin Ward (Dennis Weaver) to act as sheriff taking him in as a prisoner, then once inside he plans to free all the prisoners to create a diversion and tie down the guards.
As you might expect this is achieved with a little hitch here and there to ratchet up the tension. But then when we expect an army of guards in hot pursuit and a massive shootout or Sledge to come up with some other clever way of escaping, it turns into The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and the tension just drains away, hampered by a cute unbelievable ending where Sledge chooses love over gold.
Somehow the third act robs it of what it had going for it, a tough guy devoid of sentimentality, in the vein of the Lee Marvin of Point Blank (1967). You might as well have inserted an old lady or a kid and be done with it as the reason for Sledge to change his ways and, unfortunately, it just kills off interest in the character. Redemption isn’t what we came for. You can get that any day of the week at the movies. But, ruthlessness, that’s a different story and you’d be surprised how well that can play.
Maybe there’s some unseen Hollywood code. If you’re a proper star, you can only be a tough guy if you don’t kill people (i.e. Butch Cassidy though not The Sundance Kid) or if your toughness is in pursuit of bad guys (True Grit, 1969).
There are some other interesting elements. There’s a second ambush, a street shoot-out, a la The Wild Bunch. There’s a banjo-playing deputy sheriff and a keen-eyed Sheriff (Wayde Preston) who can suss out a wrong ‘un. Dead men earn their keep, either on horseback providing cover or lying on the ground where their pistols come in handy. A small town is emptied by people attending a funeral, masked faces and all.
And there’s a good bit of sense – a Derringer has such a short range that a prison guard with the necessary keys for escape has to be passed cell by cell down a row until he can come within shooting distance for the gun to achieve its threat.
James Garner is indeed excellent in his new disguise, drawl gone, hair flopping all over the place, not a quip in sight. There’s not much room for anyone else though Claude Akins (Return of the Seven, 1966) deserves a nod. Italian Laura Antonelli (The Innocent, 1976) as the hooker in love sparkles though I’m guessing she was dubbed. John Marley (The Godfather, 1972) is a scene-stealing role does his best to steal the movie from Garner.
Actor Victor Morrow directed this, his sophomore effort. He had a hand in the screenplay, too. He parlayed the fame he’s achieved from long-running television series Combat (1962-1967) in attempting to shift him from being cast as the bad guy on the big screen but, unfortunately, he’s best remembered not for this but for his tragic ending, when he died on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983).
Which is a shame because this is a decent enough effort.
Engaging enough when in heist mode, less so when it disappears down the Sierra Madre rabbit hole.
Easily the most underrated western of all time. Few people saw it on release and precious few since. If remembered at all, it’s for reasons of movie trivia. Robert Redford got into a legal fight with Paramount when he pulled out of the starring role. And it was what was being shot in the background of the Burt Reynolds movie Fade In (1968).
Decades before cultural appropriation was a major no-no, Americans didn’t take too kindly to Brits taking on top-billed roles in westerns. Audiences sniggered at Dirk Bogarde as a Mexican bandit in The Singer Not the Song (1960), John Mills proved an obstacle to audience acceptance of Chuka (1967) and Shalako (1969) starring Sean Connery, the world’s biggest box office draw at the time, would become a huge flop Stateside.
Yet there are some extraordinary moments here. Some, frankly, I’m astonished never rated a mention at the time nor since. The director’s use of natural sound is ground-breaking. For a start, there’s very little music, none of the triumphal brass that generally accompanies hordes of cowboys racing across plains. Often, here, all we get is hoofbeats. In terms of the aural Hitchcock would have applauded one scene, where a man is hunted through tall grass. All we hear is the crackling sound of the pursuers as they stalk him through the dried-out terrain.
Most times when in other films we see a bunch of cowboys charging along, it’s filmed from the front or the side. Reason being, shoot it from the back and you’ve got to deal with all the dust churned up by the hooves. Not so, here, bring on the dust. Let’s have something new.
There’s even a nod to The Searchers (1956), the famous doorway scenes, but here the main character is neither coming nor coming but cannot make up his mind whether to do either and so slouches against the doorframe.
The opening sequence is The Wild Bunch (1969) in reverse. It’s the good guys in the town, and the bandits who create the ambush and, minus Peckinpah’s obsession with bloodletting, treat their captives ever bit as brutally. Even here, there are two notable scenes. In the first, our hero Blue (Terence Stamp) has been sitting napping under his hat when a troop of Mexican soldiers arrive. Once they hunker down inside the saloon he throws a huge red scarf in the hair, signal to the watching bandits. Then, after the soldiers have been routed, and their leader is still trying to make a stand, Blue races up behind and whips away first his upraised gun, then his hat, then the man himself.
And these are not ordinary bandits. You might think they are given our post-action introduction to them shows them whoring, gambling and fighting. But actually they are revolutionaries and leader Ortega (Ricardo Montalban) has a strategic brain and realizes that they have to take the fight across the river to the Americans – on their most important day of the year, July 4th, Independence Day – and get them so riled up they do something about the inequities in Mexico.
And he has his work cut out to rein in his rebellious son and the concerns raised by his number two that the life, hiding out in the hills and sleeping in caves, is losing its appeal to his followers. So, intelligent bandits.
The Americans might not be particularly bothered by their neighbors, but still they’ve got a stuffed mannikin hanging from a noose with the word “Greasers” written upon its chest. The bandits break up the party, rob the Yanks, but for some reason leave the enemy with all their weapons, allowing the farmers to form an immediate posse and set off in pursuit.
Blue is shot but makes his way to a farmhouse where, luckily for him, he is tended by farmer’s daughter Joanne (Joanna Pettet) whom he previously saved from rape. It’s a bit of a tip-off that the fugitive goes by the name Azul (the Spanish word for “blue”) to the Mexicans given, I’m assuming, all Mexicans are brown-eyed. So he must be an outlander. And so he is, brought up by the Mexican bandits.
At first he appears to be of the Clint Eastwood persuasion, monosyllabic to the point of dumbness, but, eventually, in a quite brilliant scene, forced to utter a word before Joanna cuts his throat with a razor, an idea that found its way, as I recall, into Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988).
And if ever action carries more meaning than words, it’s in the scene where Joanne discovers Blue has apparently fled only to spy him ploughing the fields. As you might expect, whether an American male or female is brought up by Native Americans (Hombre, 1967) or as here Mexicans, they find it hard to be accepted. The issue is forced upon his new countrymen when the bandits return, and Blue has to choose a side.
Blue was an orphan thanks to racism against his American parents when they settled in Mexico. And he suffers, unfairly you would say given he was born in the U.S., from racism again when he crosses the border.
The sex scene is brilliantly handled, relying both on sight and sound. It’s Joanna who has to instigate it, instinctively knowing that he won’t make any move in case it is wrongly interpreted. The father, noting her bedroom is empty, begins to walk along the corridor to Blue’s room. Hearing his footsteps, Joanna turns out the light. Seeing the light go out, the father retreats – on tiptoe.
There’s also the best demonstration of pistol shooting this side of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the following year. And without taking anything away from the Robert Redford scene, it’s remarkably similar.
And Blue proves himself to be a brilliant tactician. He sets up a stunning ambush and the bandits are slaughtered from both sides of the river when they attempt to cross. His leadership, unusually, sets up emotional issues. When Joanne reacts against this new tough side of him, it’s her father that calms her. But that isn’t the peach. Blue confesses that he enjoys killing, it “pleasures” him.
I’m afraid to say the ending of Butch Cassidy also has remarkable similarities to this. There it’s the freeze frame that encapsulates the death of the heroes. Here, the camera draws back and back into the sky as Joanne holds her dead lover in the river.
Terence Stamp (The Collector, 1965) doesn’t quite have enough going on behind the eyes to become a top-class actor so sensibly director Silvio Narrazino (Georgy Girl, 1966) avoids going in too close on the baby blues and allows the actor freedom of movement to reveal his feelings, the slouching in the doorway one example, another being Blue’s slow realization that much of what he sees in the farmer’s house is familiar. Stamp acquits himself well in the action scenes.
But Joanna Pettet (The Best House in London, 1969) is the revelation. We’re quite used to spunky or feisty females in westerns. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen one who takes control with subtlety. Her father Doc Morton (Karl Malden) can’t get a word out of Blue no matter the threats uttered and violence threatened. But when Joanna takes up a cut-throat razor for the first time in her life and begins to trim his stubble, deliberately making a hash of it, that’s as novel a meet-cute as you’re going to find as well as one of the best definitions of female character that you’ll see in a western.
Written by Meade Roberts (The Stripper, 1963) and Ronald M. Cohen (The Good Guys and the Bad Guys, 1969).
One of the most stylish and innovative westerns you’ll ever see and you need to watch it with your ears attuned to sound.
Although Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) is my all-time favorite western and although the first X-certificate movie I sneaked into as a teenager was The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966/1968), I never had much interest in spaghetti westerns. For a start, by the time I started my serious cinemagoing – bear in mind I grew up in towns without picture houses – the spaghetti western sub-genre was long gone.
So I was surprised to find how stylish and intriguing this little number was. People had odd ideas about style: they think it’s about capturing a vista at sunset or the way a director moves the camera or some effect gained from the cinematography. But there are other, as important, aspects. And two, perhaps the smallest of the effective ingredients, are on show here.
The first comes with the opening shot. Some cowboys are braving torrential rain. Now movie rain doesn’t behave the same way as real rain. It’s directed and its force depends on something else beyond nature. It’s too consistent in the way that real rain isn’t. So to convince us that these dudes are enduring a storm, director Giulio Petroni has set up on the very edge of the screen a lamp that moves, twisting one way and the other as the wind shifts direction, flaring up and flickering down depending on the position it holds. That little thing was what it took to convince me this was a storm.
The second thing was the editing. Again, critics intend to focus on some unusual aspect. Fast-cutting, for example, as in The Wild Bunch (1969) or cutting between a match and a sunrise (Lawrence of Arabia, 1962)) or from one pillow to another in separate households (Zee & Co, X Y & Zee, 1972). But actually the biggest benefit of good editing is to keep the story moving and not waste time
So here we cut from our blue-eyed anti-hero Bill (John Philip Law) being told to meet a bad guy in his office. Next thing, Bill is entering a darkened room. Automatically, you think this is a trap, that he’s going into villainous saloon owner Cavanaugh’s (Anthony Dawson) office. Instead, he confronts the other anti-hero, criminal Ryan (Lee Van Cleef), just released from prison after 15 years. And without any dialog to otherwise explain the situation, we understand immediately from previous interaction that Bill has been hired by the bad guy to kill Ryan.
There’s countless examples of this kind of editing where action sets the tone rather than dialog, although in the latter regard some of the lines are filled with edge.
Bill and Ryan really should be working as a team. They both want revenge on the same gang of outlaws, Bill because, as a child, he witnessed the gang murder his family and rape his mother and sister, and Ryan because he was fitted up for the robbery the gang committed. But both want the sole satisfaction of carrying out the revenge.
Ryan is something of a mentor to the greenhorn, a skilled gunslinger without the smarts necessary to hold his own. Ryan constantly shows Bill how much he still has to learn about looking after himself and the teaching comes with sharp consequence, Bill left horseless on two occasions and having to tramp miles into the nearest town.
So they get in each other’s way. Bill kills Cavanaugh without realizing that the only reason the businessman is still alive is that Ryan wants reparation from him of $15,000 – $1,000 for each of the years he spent in prison. And now he saddles Bill with that debt.
Ryan knows exactly who he’s hunting down but Bill has to do it the hard way, following a series of clues, personal elements of the masked guys who slaughtered his family, someone who wears distinctive spurs, another with a tattoo on his chest and so on.
This proves a particularly good twist on the older guy-younger guy narrative device so often used in Hollywood. The rivalry rarely cools, Bill taking simple revenge on Ryan at any opportunity.
Eventually, they do agree to work together after Bill works out that Ryan was one of the gang, except that the older man arrived too late to take part in the massacre but just in time to save Bill from being consumed by a raging fire.
The last twist is saved for the climax.
United Artists waited until Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy had opened the box office doors in America before pushing this out in 1969 (hence the odd dating). Lee Van Cleeef essays a more considered version of his Man in Black persona from For a few Dollars More (1965/1967). John Philip Law (Barbarella, 1969) would never work out, unlike George Peppard, say, that the intensity of his gaze and the blueness of his eyes distracted from his acting.
Put me in mind to check out some of the other spaghetti westerns directed by Guilio Petroni such as A Sky Full of Stars for a Roof (1968). Written by Luciano Vincenzoni (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly).
I’m rescuing another low-budget western from critical oblivion. While this can’t boast existentialism to boost its credentials or claim to belong to the cult fraternity and, technically, doesn’t belong to the revisionist sub-genre which was beginning to gather pace, and while you won’t go to this for visual style or striking composition, there is more than enough going on for it to be worthy of reassessment.
For a start it majors on remorse. You might come across a western hero who bitterly regrets the woman cast aside or the family abandoned (though more likely such actions will sit lightly), but you’ll virtually never find anyone who regrets using the gun, whether for righteous reasons or not. But here you’ve got the two main characters, one on the side of the law and the other of a criminal disposition, who both show remorse for their actions. And had the director been more disposed to the visual he would have made a great deal more of the scene where the black-garbed widows arrive in town, victims of both gunslingers who killed their husbands and of the judges who pronounced the death sentence on their gunslinging husbands.
And there’s considerable pause to imagine what happens to such widows. Unless they can find a benefactor, perhaps an older unmarried rancher or a widower, they are going to end up working in saloons and selling their bodies. On top of that we have a cracker of a courtroom drama where the exceptionally clever lawyer can twist the facts to suit his client.
This could also have been another kind of western altogether, the one where the hero is constantly beset by a variety of enemies, and the narrative therefore one of tension. But Judge Clem Rogers (Dale Robertson) has four separate outfits baying for his blood and still director William F. Claxton manages to also fit in all these ideas about remorse, the law, widows, conniving lawyers, the entitled of that era, and failed romance.
Rogers is in town for the trial of former friend Pete (John Agar), son of Tom (Barton McClane) the biggest rancher around, for killing someone in cold blood. Tom, a piece of work, has various plans to tilt the odds in his favor, first planning to blackmail Rogers over being caught in a honeytrap with Pete’s fiancée Ellie Irish (Yvonne DeCarlo) and whichever way the trial goes he has hired gunslinger Joe Rile (Bruce Cabot) at a fee of $10,000 to kill the judge. Rile and Clem have history, the gunslinger killed the judge’s father. And it’s Tom who hits on the scheme of embarrassing the judge by flooding the town with widows, many of whom are widows thanks to Rogers.
And there are four other dudes, three brothers and an outsider, also intent on killing Rogers. While Sheriff Ed Tanner (Wiliam Bendix) isn’t inept he lacks the force of personality to keep the bad guys in check and when he’s wounded his inexperienced deputy Tim (Rod Lauren) foolishly steps up to the plate.
You can’t help but feel sorry for Ellie, forced to play the part of the lure to dupe Rogers, especially when it’s clear she has more feelings for him than she does for Pete, whom she admits she doesn’t love but needs his security. There’s an interesting power struggle between Tom and Rile with the gunslinger refusing to kowtow to his employer. The court case is riveting because it turns on various twists. And climax is a knockout that you won’t see coming.
This isn’t one like The Shooting (1966), rescued from oblivion by critics and cultists – Paramount issued it as a second feature so it’s not unseen – and it’s not trying to rewrite the Hollywood history of Native Americans, and as I said it’s not distinguished visually, but it does pack an awfully thoughtful punch, tackling areas that the bulk of western film directors have ignored.
Dale Robertson (Coast of Skeletons, 1965) heads a good B-picture cast with veterans William Bendix (Oscar-nominated for Wake Island, 1943), Yvonne De Carlo (career revived by The Munsters, 1964-1966), Lon Chaney Jr (The Wolf Man, 1941) and Bruce Cabot (King Kong, 1933).
William F. Claxton (Desire in the Dust, 1960) is to be commended for cramming in so much interest. Script by Steve Fisher (Rogue’s Gallery, 1968).
Lightning didn’t strike once never mind three times as with Monte Hellman’s predecessor The Shooting (1966) and all the flaws of that picture are multiplied without either the free pass of being classed as existential or a central performance such as that of Millie Perkins to give it an boost and, as importantly, to provide it with a contemporary edge.
All it proves is that Jack Nicholson should stick to acting rather than screenwriting. Most of the dialog in trying to be authentic just doesn’t ring true and the story is muddled with many too many characters. Calling this offbeat is doing it a favor.
And although, in any poster or copy of the picture you’re likely to see now, Jack Nicholson is top-billed, he’s far from the main act – though the movie dodges around so much it’s hard to find a central character to focus. And if you came to this expecting another acting tour de force from Millie Perkins, you had to wait a good hour before she appeared.
Theoretically, Monte Hellman was inheriting the Budd Boetticher mantle, but that only went as far as making do with a low budget. Though there’s the occasional striking visual, he can’t match Boetticher in terms of composition nor in clarity of narrative. But this was the era when the waters were being muddied between good guys and bad guys, so in a sense, taking Hellman as pre-empting that particular charge, he scores some points there.
Budget deficit led to the other element of authenticity to which this can lay claim. It’s noisy. I mean, noise of the wind – perhaps hence the title – constantly intrudes. Cinema verite perhaps but more likely lack of proper sound equipment.
A bunch of outlaws led by Blind Dick (Harry Dean Stanton) who’s only half-blind, patch over one eye, robs a stage and holes out in a cabin in the hills. A meandering trio of cowboys – Vern (Cameron Mitchell), Wes (Jack Nicholson) and Otis (Tom Filer) – looking for shelter encounter them. For a time it looks like the outlaws are just going to shoot them and be rid of the intruders. Instead, they feed them beans and biscuits and liquor.
Next morning a posse turns up and starts shooting at anyone in sight, including Vern and his buddies. They burn out the cabin and hang Blind Dick. Otis is shot but now, thanks to guilt by association, Vern and Wes are wanted fugitives. Requiring refuge, and although innocent they lean into guilt by commandeering the house of farmer Evan (George Mitchell), wife Catherine (Katherine Squire) and daughter Abigail (Millie Perkins) and hold them hostage.
Doesn’t take long for them to be rumbled by a member of the posse. They escape but Vern is wounded and Wes kills the farmer. Now they are reduced to one horse. The dying Vern does a self-sacrificial number and holds off the posse until Wes can escape on the horse.
Although I’m sure many an innocent person was killed in the Wild West, and it didn’t take much for people to cross over into criminality, especially when threatened (Wes would now be wanted for murder), and so it is interesting on that score, it’s just so muddled it lacks any real weight.
We are introduced to way too many characters as a result of lack of narrative cohesion. On this performance I doubt if you would have tagged Jack Nicholson as the breakthrough performer of Easy Rider (1969) and Millie Perkins is given nothing on which to build from what should have been her breakthrough turn in The Shooting.
In fact, most of the honors go to old-timer Cameron Mitchell (Blood and Black Lace, 1964) who’d had to head to Italy to get some decent top-billed work. If you were looking for the Jack Nicholson of the gleaming teeth and distinctive diction, then you’ll find him here but not much else. Monte Hellman would go on to find some mainstream credibility, though still erring on the offbeat, in the likes of Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter (1974). But this is embryo work.
Director Monte Hellman struck lucky three times. In the first place French critics took such a shining to this disjointed elliptical western that they tabbed it a work of existential genius. Then Jack Nicholson, who only has a small part, became a global star and it picked up a second head of steam. And now, with grief porn the latest craze thanks to the likes of Hamnet (2025) and Wuthering Heights (2026) I reckon it’s worth reassessment. But not for that wallowing in grief aspect so popular these days, but for the way genuine grief works its way out in cantankerous maddening fashion.
You’d have thought the performance of Millie Perkins would have been highlighted long before now for its feminism. Her un-named woman runs contrary to the notion of the female star in a western. She doesn’t come on all sexy in a Raquel Welch fashion, nor does she fall victim to a predatory male. But she is a heck of a creation.
She doesn’t play by any of the man-made rules in this male-dominated world. She gets what she wants by foul means and she doesn’t give a hang about whose feelings she tramples underfoot. She’s not interested in seduction, nor in finding a man, so strike out any thoughts of sex or romance, and she’s domineering, rude and contrary.
Given the western is weighted down with enigma, you have to work hard to find out what it’s all about and what’s she’s after. And her introduction tells you she’s trouble. She kills her own horse so she can appear to two cowboys running a defunct mine as a woman needing help. The younger Coley (Will Hutchins) would be easily duped by any woman with an ounce of the smarts. The older Willett Gashade (Warren Oates) is less easily led, though when the woman offers $500 if they help her reach the nearest town, they’re ready to oblige.
But she wants to make haste, while Willett wants to ensure they are equipped for the journey, so saddling up an extra mule to carry their supplies. But a mule slows them down, so she finds a way to stampede it off. And every now and then she lets off a random shot, Willett working out she’s trying to attract someone’s attention. The someone turns out to be gunslinger Billy Spear (Jack Nicholson). When she insists on going off-trail Gashade works out she’s hunting for someone.
That’s another elliptical moment. She’s hunting the killer of her son. Even though it was an accident, she wants revenge.
And that’s the grief spelled out in a variety of ways but never with the usual emotional baggage, not even a tear. Eventually, we’re in Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) territory where men are going mad. Here, they keep going after their horses die and trek over desolate merciless country until they find their quarry, who turns out to be Gashade’s brother.
Turns out, too, she hardly needs her entourage. She finishes off her nemesis while Spear and Gashade struggle behind. She only needed the men for their tracking skills.
So what we have instead of the existential is something considerably more solid and worth far more than falling in with some arthouse accolade. This is both an exceptional study of grief and an exceptional study of a woman, possibly the first in the feminist line if you discount Barbara Stanwyck who still, generally, was better off with a man at her side.
All her deriding of the men, her mental cruelty, her whimsical actions, make every bit of sense when you realize these are all expressions of grief. Except for her murderous intent, she’s almost stoical in her grief, never allowing wanton emotion to get in the way, and even when turning tearful might work in winning men over she doesn’t give in to the temptation. She can twist Coley round her little finger anyways and she knows how to handle Gashade, teaching him in no uncertain terms who’s boss.
In some respects Monte Hellman (Ride the Wild Whirlwind, 1966) is the inheritor of the Budd Boetticher mantle, purveyor of lean westerns short on running time with a principled hero, here read heroine. But Hellman lacks Boetticher’s compositional artistry and could do with putting some more work into the storytelling department.
If you’ve come looking for the Jack Nicholson of Chinatown (1973) you’ll be disappointed. He’s hardly in it, though he is an exemplar of that mantra in The Housemaid (2025) of teeth being a privilege. Warren Oates (The Wild Bunch, 1969) is a better bet, providing a foretaste of his grizzly characters to come.
But Millie Perkins (Wild in the Streets, 1968) tears up the screen. From her bold introduction to the savage conclusion she presents a vivid characterization of a woman expunging her grief with violence. Written by Carole Eastman (Five Easy Pieces, 1970).
Randolph Scott went out on a high – or at least that was the plan, his intended retirement derailed when Sam Peckinpah made him an offer he couldn’t refuse for Ride the High Country / Guns in the Afternoon (1962). But if this was his planned final movie, he couldn’t have wished for a better last hurrah.
Director Budd Boetticher (A Time for Dying, 1969) became something of a cult item once the fashionista critics of the 1960s and 1970s got their hands on him, and pulled out the stops for low-budget pictures made with tight artistic vision in preference to an overload of bloated big budget efforts. This was the last of a western quintet starring Scott.
Boetticher exercises remarkable restraint throughout, very little in the way of emotion, or close-ups, and his use of widescreen follows the classic composition, relevant movement taking place to the side of the screen or in a corner or instead of left to right the action snakes top to bottom.
The story is exceptionally lean but in that simplicity carries enormous power. A man of principle Jefferson Cody (Randolph Scott) is up against the unscrupulous Ben Lane (Claude Akins), the situation complicated by the fact that the good guy isn’t going to make it out of Indian Territory without the help of the bad guy. At stake is a cool $5,000 (worth $125,000) today. Or put another way, a young woman’s life. There’s bad blood between Cody and Lane, the former court-martialing the latter while in the Army.
Cody has rescued kidnapped rancher’s wife Nancy (Nancy Gates), not by raiding the Comanche camp and pulling off the kind of action that used to take a well-practised team of experts (see The Professionals, 1966), but by hoving into view and offering to trade various goods, including a rifle, for the woman. She’s not as grateful as you might expect, fearing the reaction of her husband on her return (it’s unspoken but she would have been raped by her captors) and subsequent public humiliation.
When Comanches reappear, it looks like they’ve reneged on their deal. But they’ve not. They’ve been baited by Lane and his accomplices who, seeking the reward money, have gone in all guns blazing. Nancy turns against Cody because she imagines he, too, was after her for the money and not out of the goodness of his heart.
Lane fuels the fire by casting doubts on her husband not coming after her on his own, and pointing out that women thus rescued often rewarded their rescuer with sexual favors. Lane and his two younger buddies, Frank (Skip Homeier) and Dobie (Richard Rust), briefly discuss robbing Cody once he’s been handed the reward. But Lane has a better idea. Kill them both. The husband wants his wife back dead or alive.
Lane has the sense not to perve on the woman and the director resists the opportunity to pander to the audience by showing Nancy bathing naked in a river. Outside of the gunplay, the three outstanding scenes are smaller potatoes. One of the young lads proves he can read much to the amazement of his friend. When Frank is killed by an arrow he’s left to float down the river because nobody can afford the time to give him a proper burial. And when under attack, Cody dumps Nancy in a water trough to keep her hidden, from which she occasionally pops up sodden only to dive down again.
It’s pretty unusual for western to end on the kind of twist you’d find in film noir or a thriller. But this one is terrific. All the way through Nancy’s husband has been derided for not coming after her in person, but in the last scene we discover why. Her husband is, in fact, blind. Cody, who hasn’t been in it for the money anyway, turns away without taking a cent.
The running time is so lean – just 73 minutes – it would have been released as a supporting feature and it’s testament to the director’s principles that he didn’t try to puff out the length by sticking in some sub plots or encouraging romance.
Beautifully filmed and with a compact script by future director Burt Kennedy (The War Wagon, 1967). This was also the swansong for Nancy Gates. Claude Akins was cast by Kennedy for Return of the Seven (1966). Skip Homeier was the male lead in one of my low-budget faves Stark Fear (1962).
Compelling work and worth reassessment if you’ve not already climbed aboard the Boetticher/Scott bandwagon.
An old-style western with a modernized anti-hero in Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne), nearly as “rapaciously brutal” as the same year’s The Wild Bunch, a script with language that captured the period, a heroine Mattie Ross (Kim Darby) who falls into the robust Barbara Stanwyck/Maureen O’Hara mold, humor and action in equal measure, and an unfussy director (Henry Hathaway) who loved the panorama even more than John Ford.
Although still critically rated as not as good as The Wild Bunch, and still mostly disdained by academics, I would argue that it has been grossly under-rated and fully deserving of a re-evaluation. In the first place, despite direction very much in the old school, Hathaway exhibits many stylistic flourishes, not least the very long shot which has rarely been used to such effect. He also utilizes the shaky-camera point-of-view in a much more effective manner than Mackenna’s Gold (1969) to record Cogburn’s charge at the outlaws and there is even a zoom, to pick out the villain Tom Chaney.
Also, you know exactly where you are in a Hathaway picture, not just in the narrative sense, but in terms of how people lived and where the towns and farms were in relation to each other (the Ross farm is 70 miles from Fort Smith, the hamlet of McAllister 60 miles from the villains’ hideout). He liked to show many aspects of a town, so we see where the courthouse is in relation to the jail and the stable by the simple expedient of having the characters walk past them. And the movie is littered with sound effects of the most ordinary kind (blacksmith’s hammer, train whistle, footsteps). The film is as much about progress as Once Upon a Time in the West and The Wild Bunch, the name of the town, Fort Smith, where much of the initial action takes place, indicates it was once a frontier town.
Rooster Cogburn feels crowded out by a new generation of lawyers challenging swift justice, and Mattie Ross, hunting the killers of her father, is well schooled in argument, winning many a confrontation with apparently more experienced and wily men by being more adept at negotiation and like a chess player always one move ahead. The aftermath of the Civil War lingers in the background, demonstrated by Mattie’s weapon and Cogburn’s antipathy to Texas Ranger LaBeef (Glen Campbell). But the story strikes an even balance, no matter how assured Mattie Ross comes across in civilization she almost comes apart in the wilds and without the protection of Cogburn would have met the kind of fate at the hands of men undergone by female characters in The Stalking Moon (1969), Mackenna’s Gold and The Wild Bunch.
It should be said here that the movie is full of audience direction, we are always told where Mattie will go next or where Cogburn is intending to go, with accompanying plausible reason, especially when later Cogburn calls off the hunt for the outlaws. There is no exploration of mystery, the characters are always upfront, and where characters express regret is it minus the self-pitying of The Wild Bunch. Nobody is defined by something they should have done instead, so, in that respect, the narrative is as clear as the overall direction.
We hear Cogburn’s voice before we see him, as if the director is preparing us for a different John Wayne. This is the actor in a new timbre, the usual slow drawl replaced by a raucous bark. And it is a different Wayne, one eye covered in a black patch, giving him a piratical look. He hustles the prisoners out, kicking one straggler viciously in the butt. Wayne walks differently, too. Instead of the famous slow walk, Cogburn is a man in a hurry, pushing forward with purposeful stride, ignoring Mattie as she comes racing after him, slamming the basement door in her face.
LeBeef is another dreamer, “nobody yet” but aiming to “marry well”, in this case “a well-placed young lady in Waco” who would “look with favor” on him for bringing back Chaney who has also killed a senator. His charm fails to convince Mattie to join forces. She sees right through him: “I have no regard for you but I’m sure you have enough for yourself to go around.”
Then comes a four-minute Mattie tour de force as she confronts Col Stonehill (Strother Martin) and demands $300 in reparation for the loss of her father’s saddle and for selling him dodgy horses. She threatens him with the law in the shape of Daggett, her secret weapon, and she knows enough about legality to beat Stonehill at his own game. Even better, this is no meek woman. It is one thing to be able to score points off an old lawman like Cogburn, who would have been putty in the hands of any capable woman of the Stanwyck/O’Hara variety, but another to outwit a wily old horse-dealer like Stonehill (his title a hangover from the Civil War and one which ensures a measure of respect). Even better again, she knows she will win, so confident that she has already drawn up the papers to sign.
Now neither Cogburn nor LeBeef are witness to this demonstration of her capability, so they will, naturally, treat her as a young girl, “baby sister” in Cogburn’s dismissive term. But Hathaway is setting a trap for the audience. Having witnessed this display, we think she will be able to hold her own in the wilderness, mistaking her willfulness for sagacity, and so are on her side in her attempts to win over the two men, when, in fact, she will prove to be so out of her depth as to endanger herself and others.
The pursuit is dogged, and everyone at some point is found wanting. Cogburn smokes the villains out from their cabin and would kill the others without warning except LaBeef objects out of principle and Mattie wants Chaney alive.
At Mattie’s prompting, we hear Cogburn’s mostly unvarnished, but never maudlin, history, he lost his eye in the war, committed a robbery to fund the purchase of an eating place that had a billiard table, married a grass widow, until she left him for her first husband, taking their son, Horace, hiding his sorrow at the boy’s departure in a grumpy “he never liked me anyway” and berating him as “clumsy.” When she lies down to sleep, he gazes at her fondly for the first time, perhaps prompted by memory of his loss.
In the climactic shoot-out, in the most famous John Wayne image since his character’s introduction in Stagecoach (1969), first in long shot then from his point-of-view with a shaky camera, he grasps the reins in his teeth and fires two-handed. He kills two but Pepper shoots his horse from under him and Cogburn, in a sign of his age when otherwise traditionally cowboys leap free of a falling horse, is trapped on the ground under the weight of the animal, unable to reach his gun or to shift. The wounded Pepper advances. He towers over Cogburn until LaBeef, whose marksmanship had previously been in question, saves his life.
And that should pretty much have been the end of the picture, roll credits with Chaney being hung, but there is still nearly 15 minutes to go. Returning to collect Chaney, LaBeef is ambushed, cracked on the head by a rock. Mattie shoots Chaney but the recoil sends her into the snake pit. Cogburn arrives in time to kill the wanted man, also sending him into the pit. She has damaged her shoulder and cannot pull herself up on a rope so Cogburn has to descend. He shoots a rattlesnake but another bites her.
She still had enough presence of mind to demand he first collect her fallen gun and her father’s gold piece from Chaney’s corpse. As he hauls himself up, a dazed LaBeef, mounted on a horse, pulls on the tope to ease their ascent, but the effort is too much, and he keels over and dies.
Mattie strokes his head, the first sign of her changed feelings towards him. Alternatively, this could be guilt because it was her wrong-headedness that caused his death, but that seems unlikely, she is not one to covet regret. Cogburn slaps saliva on the wound (rather than, as we might expect from watching other westerns, sucking out the poison), puts her arm in a sling, and sticks her on Blackie, her horse, despite her protests about the little horse carrying such a weight. Cogburn is ruthless, riding the horse so hard it dies. Then he carries her and finally steals a buggy.
Where previously most of the journey had been rendered in long shot, now Hathaway reverts to medium shot and close up of the haggard Cogburn racing desperately to save the girl’s life. When we cut to Cogburn and Chen Lee instinctively we know she has been saved. The lawyer Daggett appears to pay Cogburn what he is owed plus $200 for saving her life, though, typically, she has prepared a receipt for him to sign.
Then she is home. It is winter. Snow lies on the ground. Cogburn explains there was no woman waiting for LaBeef, though the marshal has collected the reward. She shows him her father’s grave and wants Cogburn, the father she has adopted, to be buried in the same burial ground. She gives him her father’s gun and in a final triumphant moment the “fat old man” gloriously rides over a four-bar fence waving his hat in the air.
John Wayne received just reward with his Oscar, Glen Campbell (The Cool Ones, 1967) does better than we might expect from a singer. Kim Darby (Bus Riley’s Back in Town, 1965) was ignored by Oscar voters but she certainly holds her own. Terrific direction by Henry Hathaway (5 Card Stud, 1968) from a script by Marguerite Roberts (5 Card Stud) based on the bestseller by Charles Portis (Norwood, 1970).
The Magnificent 60s 