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The camera slowly pans on a rendezvous in the woods to reveal a corpse dangling from a tree, it might be a Mann or De Toth composition except that it's Sergio Sollima's beady, politicized eye on the American frontier. The seasoned bounty hunter (Lee Van Cleef) is deadly enough to wipe out bandits by the handful yet idealistic enough to believe in progress trumping profit, just the stooge to run for the Senate and benefit the rapacious railroad tycoon (Walter Barnes). One last job, the Mexican peasant (Tomas Milian) accused of raping and murdering a girl, pursued into the wilderness and across the border. The order of "masters and obeyers" challenged by ramrod and trickster, "it becomes a personal matter." King's The Bravados is the basis, only the revelation of the lies behind the gunslinger's mission lead not to his spiritual fall but to his radical awakening. Fuller's Forty Guns is also visible in the imperious widow (Nieves Navarro) lording over her muddy ranch like a sagebrush Circe, elsewhere the monocled Prussian baron (Gérard Herter) plays Für Elise, beholds a bloody sunrise, and anticipates the Teutonic advisers in Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. (Such baroque figures abound in Sollima's landscape, where "Brother Smith & Wesson" dispenses advice at the monastery and a scrawny teenager is saved from assault only to be returned to the wrinkled wagon train leader who's her husband.) "Here in Mexico, the Americanos and the dogs of Juárez can make trouble for each other with the approval of the authorities." The final duel is a question of hands and eyes, even the desert can glow once the walls of the system have collapsed. With María Granada, Ángel del Pozo, Robert Camardiel, Luisa Rivelli, and Fernando Sancho.
--- Fernando F. Croce |