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The camera opens on a mounted guard atop a craggy cliff, then zooms back until a Cavalry soldier appears foreground-right and tilts down to reveal the vast quarry of a forced labor camp. The grizzled prisoner (Cameron Mitchell) was once a legendary gunslinger, he escapes to deal with unfinished business before his eyesight fades, "a brave or foolish thing." The New Mexico refuge holds old secrets, namely the local maiden (Diana Martín) who's in the dark about being the fugitive's daughter. The burg is bled dry by the accomplice turned sheriff (Georges Rivière), something of a dandified despot with an army of cutthroats and an official explanation for the extortion racket ("something like paying taxes"). Outlaws are the other side of the coin, their depredations cannot compete with the violence unleashed under the silver star. The first view of Sergio Corbucci's caustic sagebrush, concurrent with Fistful of Dollars and, in Fernando Sancho's roaring bandit king, ahead of The Wild Bunch. "The cemetery is full of guys who learned to shoot," it also has the wife's grave glimpsed in a blurry POV effect reaching back to Harry Carey, cf. Ford's Straight Shooting. Raid on the burning ranch, torture in the barn, sacrifice of the perfidious mistress (Ethel Rojo). The showdown at night is a Via Dolorosa, the nearly blinded hero depends on sounds to confront a passel of henchmen. (One pulls the cork out of his bottle mid-stalk and is rewarded with a hail of bullets.) "Tell me—is there any particular way you'd like to die?" Mitchell's weariness at the close is astutely followed by Hellman into Ride in the Whirlwind. With Antonio Roso, Antonio Casas, Ferdinando Poggi, Gino Pernice, and Julio Peña.
--- Fernando F. Croce |