Lo chiamavano Tresette... giocava sempre col morto / In the West There Was a Man Named Invincible / Man Called Invincible / Tricky Dicky

Recently I revisited a couple of Giuliano Carnimeo / Anthony Ascott's Sartana films as part of the box set. These proved to be an ideal grounding for watching this 1973 comedy spaghetti from the director, which stars George Hilton, Cris Huerta and Evelyn Stewart.

The plot, which involves the secret transportation of a shipment of gold – one that everyone and their dog seems to know about, indicating that things are not entirely on the level – is as complicated as any of the official Sartana entries.

Technological gimmicks are similarly prevalent, most notably in Tresette/Tricky Dicky's (Hilton's) music boxes, which variously also function as Gatling guns and explosively in a proto “candygram for Mongo” fashion.

The general tone of the film, however, is more akin to the Trinity series, with plenty of cartoon and slapstick humour, including an actual pie-fight and a gag in which the heroes escape from (the sheriff's own) jail by painting out the bars of their cell to make it look like they have escaped; nor does anyone ever gets killed by one of the music boxes, only humiliated.

Hilton and Huerta likewise form a kind of Hill and Spencer pairing, of brains and brawn respectively – Huerta's Bambi (Bambino?) having been appointed sheriff in MacPherson/MacPiedish's (sic) town, Apple Pie City, because he appears a born loser (read honest) whose career so far has been a series of moves to less and less prestigious posts, beginning with Kansas City. (This also provides a clue: those in power in that notoriously corrupt place didn't want him around, given the tendency of Dicky to follow in his wake.)

One thus gets the impression that Carnimeo and his collaborators took a Sartana script, renamed their protagonist and chose to play up the comedy aspect. This is perhaps best epitomised by the black clad gunfighter Twinkletoes who doggedly follows Dicky around challenging him duel after duel, without ever winning nor being taken out in the more serious “playing for keeps” manner Sartana would have employed when necessary.

Stylistically the film is very much like most other Carnimeo films I have seen: He is not afraid to try out just about any technique you can think of – crash zooms, whip pans, accelerated motion etc. – but does so in a way that makes even a Sergio Corbucci appear disciplined by comparison.




Examples of the comic-book visuals

Needless to say it doesn't all work – the likes of the Bent Gang and the Closet Cousins are somewhat lazy gags, with the double-entendres and one-liners equally hit and miss (“I find her a bit dykey, Dicky” another example of going for easy targets) – but enough of it does for the film to be worth a look if you are in the right mood, with Hilton's easy charm and the fact that everyone involved was clearly having fun themselves definite plus points.

Finally, it was a strange coincidence that on the IMDB today the quote of the day came from Frost/Nixon. Richard: “That's our tragedy, you and I Mr. Frost. No matter how high we get, they still look down at us.”

[See also: http://www.europeanfilmreview.co.uk/eurowestern/man_called_invincible.htm and http://www.doomedmoviethon.com/reviews2/203mancalledinvincible.htm]

Ricchi, ricchissimi... praticamente in mutande / Don't Play with Tigers

There’s quite a difference between the Italian and English titles for this three part sex comedy anthology directed by Sergio Martino.

The Italian, Ricchi, ricchissimi, practicamente in mutande literally translates as rich, richer, practically in (the) underwear, referring to hotter / colder kind of game and thus providing a more apt analogy for the ‘nearly there’ sexual outcomes of the three stories.

They are framed via the device of a day in the life of a court, where the judge presides over the three cases, each presented via flashback narrated by the male accused, incarnated by Pippo Caruso, Lino Banfi and Renato Pozzetto respectively.

In the first he takes his wife and sons to the beach and builds a beach hut but is then understandably threatened and troubled by the presence of a free-living and loving group of French nudists, led by a rather well-endowed man, who have also decide to set up camp there...

In the second he’s a businessman, the owner of a successful sausage factory, who believes he has attracted the attentions of a German contessa, with all manner of farcical antics ensuing as he thus tries to avoid his own family...

In the third he’s another businessman, the owner of an struggling shipbuilders, who sees salvation in the form of persuading an Arab sheik to commission a yacht. Unfortunately the sheikh takes an undue interest in his wife, wanting her to join his harem as the brunette pearl amongst the existing 12 blond ones as part of the deal.

While the second and third episodes also feature Janet Agren and Edwige Fenech respectively, the latter also being paired with her old giallo colleague George Hilton as the Sheikh, fans of the two actresses may be disappointed the lack of actual T&A on display, all of which is concentrated in the first story and of an equal opportunities nature.

If the filmmakers may be accused of playing on stereotypes, particularly in the third episode, this is offset by their fair-minded skewering of various Italian types, whether the judiciary, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat and the various comic reversals and misidentifications that occur as the narratives are resolved.

Here, we might also consider a skit from the contemporaneous British show The Young Ones, representative of a new comedy that purported to reject the racist and sexist values of its predecessor: in an Arab court, the advisor asks the sheikh if he would like to see the foreign ambassador over the subject of their alleged mandatory cruelty. Yes, replies the sheikh. Which bit of him would you like to see? asks the advisor.

Above all, however, is that it is simply funny - and more specifically essentially harmlessly so.

Il Tempo degli avvoltoi / Time of Vultures / Last of the Badmen

Directed by Nando Cicero, this is one of those spaghetti westerns which deserves to be a lot better known than it would appear to be, with only two comments on the IMDB.

Featuring the winning combination of George Hilton and Frank Wolff, giving one of the best performances of his under-rated, all too brief career, alongside a solid supporting cast including Eduardo Fajardo, John Bartha, Femi Benussi and Pamela Tudior, it's an unusually harsh and cynical tale even by the standards of the genre.

Hilton plays Kitosch, a gun for hire who is caught in bed with his boss Don Fernando's wife Steffy, for which he is punished with a branding. Kitosch escapes the Don's clutches, makes it to the nearest town and asks for protection from the sheriff. Instead, he is arrested and thrown into jail, to be handed over to the Don's men once they arrive.

At this point another outlaw, Wolff's black-clad Joshua Tracy, intervenes. He kills the sheriff and the two outlaws take off and team up. It doesn't take long, however, for Kitosch to realise that his erstwhile rescuer and partner is literally mad, bad and dangerous to know, prone to fits and consumed by a desire for revenge on his ex-wife and her current lover.

It is almost as if the characters of Mortimer and El Indio from Leone's For a Few Dollars More had been fused into the one man - a difficult role, full of contradictions for the performer to embody. The versatile Wolff, equally comfortable in Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Guiliano and Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence, was one of the few actors fully capable of tackling the role.

Under these circumstances, everyone else's contributions, while perfectly adequate and to type - Fajardo is the villainous Don, Bartha the sheriff etc. - are overshadowed somewhat. Nevertheless, the film is always watchable, with plenty of action and twists in the tale to keep things interesting even when Wolff isn't on screen.

Red Blood Yellow Gold / Professionals for a Massacre

Having just been caught by Captain Richardson (Milo Quesada) and his men selling Confederate arms to the Union, three outlaws, Frank the Preacher (George Hilton), Ramirez the Mexican (George Martin) and Chatanooga Jim (Edd Byrnes) are court martialled and sentenced to death.


One and two halves of the three


Two and a half of the three...


Finally all three in the one shot, apparently about to be shot


Things get more complicated when you add a fourth...

After Frank asks the Lord for a small sign of grace that will stay their execution, the trio receive it from an unexpected source in the form of Sibley's hitherto trustworthy right-hand man Major Lloyd (Gerard Herter) who makes off with a gatling gun and a consignment of Union gold earmarked for buying much needed munitions for the Confederacy.

Reasoning that it takes a thief to catch a thief, General Sibley offers Frank, Ramirez and Jim a full pardon if they can recover the gold and bring in Lloyd, dead or alive. Reasoning that they can't be trusted, Sibley also sends Richardson along with them. He also has his own motive in that Lloyd had accused him of being a union spy.

The four men soon pick up the trail of Lloyd and his men by dint of a characteristic piece of spaghetti western logic. Finding tracks going off in four directions, they split up and take one route each. Three provide evidence of their quarry's passage – bullets, a stirrup and a saddle. The fourth produces no such traces and, as such, is clearly the way to go.

Things become a bit more complicated when, after various incidents, a Mexican bandit clan headed by a wizened old matriarch whose sons all seem to be called after their birth order take the gold off Lloyd and his men...

Red Blood Yellow Gold / Professionals for a Massacre is one of those films which illustrates the distinction between those that work for the critic and those that work for their intended audiences.

Viewed from the mainstream critic's perspective Red Blood, Yellow Gold must seem fairly derivative stuff, with a confusing narrative; stereotypical characters like the sadistic, grotesque Mexican and the honourable “Old South” Confederate, and generally lacklustre direction that springs to life only during the action scenes, the old standbies of brawls, chases and shoot themselves being in lieu of anything more demanding of filmmaker or spectator alike.

Yet, viewed from the perspective of the film's likely audience – so far as I can presume to assume it, of course, given cultural and temporal distance – it is precisely these same features that make the film work.

The confusing narrative and stereotypical characters come to emerge as a comment on the notions of campanellisimo and amoral familism referred to by Christopher Frayling, that one's only loyalties are to family, friends and so on rather than to any wider notions such as nation and class, and that anyone who believes or acts otherwise is a gullible fool whose lack of guile is to be exploited. In these terms, alliances are temporary and strategic and no-one outside the group can be trusted except for to betray or change allegiances when it suits their purposes, it's not something personal, just following of the codes of professional, business and social life.

The action sequences emerge as variant of the “electrocardiogram” model of the audience discussed by Christopher Wagstaff, of giving the terza visione spectator some thrills or other pay off every few minutes to attract his attention away from the social space of the theatre and back to the screen. In such terms it could also be argued that the confused narrative doesn't really matter insofar as this audience weren't necessarily following it and, to the extent that they were, probably had a better intuitive understanding of what was going to happen next and why than the outsider.

The distinction between the good and bad guys can also be drawn in these terms. If the good guys aren't really good by the standards of the American western, they are loyal to one another, have an infectious sense of fun, and don't indulge in quite the same kind of indiscriminate lethal violence as their enemies, who massacre a family of civilians merely to take their clothes. (A further irony sees the sole survivor of the massacre, who was absent at the time, believe that our heroes were responsible for it, leading her to alert the real perpetrators to an ambush.)

The film is on DVD from Wild East; I suspect that it looks a lot better than the old video sourced copy I viewed here, which was panned and scanned and suffers, as the screenshots indicate, from a tendency not to be able to fit everyone in on screen.

Coartada en disco rojo / I Due volti della paura / The Two Faces of Fear

Suppose it's 1972 and you're making a giallo. Sure, you've managed to secure the services of George Hilton, Fernando Rey, Luciana Paluzzi, Edouardo Fajardo and Fernando Rey; a formidable cast that should appeal to audiences in your target co-production markets of Spain and Italy. But is it enough – how many times have your audience seen Hilton do that same shifty suspect schtick or Strindberg play the ice-maiden already? What can you do to try to stand out in a crowded marketplace?

Well, if you're Tulio Demicheli the answer seemed to be to bring in some open heart surgery footage...


Would make for a good double bill with Night of the Bloody Apes?

It's a mondo-style attraction-repulsion device that makes or breaks what is otherwise be a pretty average giallo where all the right ingredients are present, but not quite mixed in the proper proportions.




It's like this officer: I was just cleaning it and it went off...

We open with a classic subjective-cameras scene. The crime is theft rather than murder, however – that comes later, with the weapon of choice unusually a pistol.

We're already getting ahead of ourselves, however, inasmuch as there is a considerable chunk of exposition to get through beforehand. Pay attention now:

The thing stolen was Dr Michele Azzini's letter accepting a job at a clinic in Milan. This clinic is the rival to the one where he and his fiancee Paola Lombardi (Strindberg) work. Paola was – and perhaps still is – in a relationship with another colleague, Dr Roberto Carli (Hilton). His wife Elena (Paluzzi) owns the clinic, which she inherited from her father and has built up with the assistance of her loyal manager – and, as we later learn, former lover – Luisi (Fajardo).




Reading too much into a tense exchange of gazes?

Elena also has a serious heart condition which needs operated on. While Roberto could perform the operation, it offers a way of exerting emotional pressure on Michele to stay at the clinic for the time being lest the offer of a 25 per cent share in the clinic not sway him...

The relative weight of these factors proves somewhat moot when Michele is murdered.

Inspector Nardi (Rey) is called in to investigate and while soon identifying the weapon – a Remington 9mm pistol, exactly like the one Elena owns, but which has now suspiciously gone missing – has considerably more trouble with motive and opportunity, with a surfeit of the former and a paucity of the latter. Everyone, it seems, has an alibi...



“I even massaged his prostate”
“Massages his prostate. Don't you know that's against the rules!” – Nardi's assistant tries to coax information out of a parrot which witnessed the crime.

Unfortunately his confusions are shared by the audience alike until late in the day, with the general sense of a narrative and character relationships that are too convoluted for their own good and of a failure to satisfactorily establish whether or not we have another point of identification with the narrative until decidedly late in the proceedings.

It is Elena who emerges as the woman in peril through an extended stalking sequence. The thing is that Elena's stalker turns out to have been one of Nardi's own men...










All the Colours of the Dark...

If, that is, it was a way of determining whether her condition was for real – it seems to be, since she's the one who then goes under the surgeon's rather than the slasher's blade, though the outcome may be the same – and/or of forcing the others to show their true colours, it was a decidedly risky one that doesn't quite convince, especially as things then play out...

While The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh used a similar device, it worked because we were with Edwige Fenech's character and had also been let in on enough of the conspiracy against her to know broadly where our loyalties lay; Strange Vice achieved a better balance between suspense and surprise where The Two Faces of Fear too often piles on one surprise after another.

Demichelli just over-eggs it: almost every little gesture and detail, every exchange of dialogue or looks amongst the central quartet is equally replete with potential meaning and thus equally meaningless, leading to too many things which go nowhere – a letter that may incriminate one suspect, an insurance policy that suggests a further motive for another – and a failure to satisfactorily engage the viewer in the process of playing detective for him or herself.

There are some gialli where you can watch them a second or third time and really appreciate the director's craft, the way he subtly directs or misdirects your attentions and presumptions – Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is perhaps the most obvious example, though Amadeo's Smile Before Death also comes to mind – but this is not one of them. Just as the those who take a psychoanalytic approach to each and every case need to be reminded a cigar is sometimes only a cigar, here Demicheli needs to be reminded that sometimes a closeup of a detail is only a close up of a detail.




Yet more stairwells to die for, even with the compositions somewhat off in the non-OAR presentation

It's more of a shame because when Dimicheli goes for the self-consciously stylish image – a defamiliarising shots of a stairwell here; some expressive use of colour there; a recurring theme of the need to read the signs – he gets it. Likewise, his failure is that of trying too hard rather than not hard enough.








It's all about reading the signs

On the plus side Rey's good-humoured, world-weary detective, who quit smoking six months previously and finds his and others' nicotine cravings to be a constant distraction, is an endearing creation. The other performances are effective, but never quite rise about the level of doing the same thing as we've seen elsewhere. Indeed, in the case of Hilton in particular this is to Two Faces of Fear's detriment because one tends to thereby recall other more consistently trashy yet engaging gialli like The Case of the Bloody Iris.

Franco Micalizzi's score is another asset and, being more in the giallo than the poliziotto vein, serves as a useful reminder of his versatility.

Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? / The Case of the Bloody Iris

En route to a meeting. presumably with a client, a high-class hooker is slashed to death in the elevator of a high-rise apartment block. Shortly thereafter one of the three people who found her body, an exotic dancer named Mizar Harrington (Carla Brait) is in turn murdered, being drowned in her bath by a masked assassin.










Did Brian De Palma see this film prior to making Dressed to Kill?

As the characteristically incompetent police investigate, a couple of models, Jennifer (Edwige Fenech) and Marilyn (Paola Quattrini), move into the Mizar's apartment at the suggestion of playboy architect Andrea Barto (George Hilton), the building's designer and also, as it happens, one of the last people to see Mizar on the night of her murder, having gone to see the “black, but not too black” (!) model at the recommendation of his campy, gay-coded photographer friend and business associate Arthur.


Professor Isaacs, Mizar Harrington and Mrs Moss discover the woman's body


Mizar is drowned in the bath; isn't it suspicious that Andrea has a claimed aversion to the sight of blood?

Andrea isn't the only suspect, however, seeing as Jennifer also find herself being stalked by by her possessive ex-husband Adam (Ben Carra), who wants her to rejoin him and his sex-cult. (“You belong to us now. You pledged yourself to us and you swore to me above all. You're my wife, remember that.”)


The titular iris, the symbol of Adam's love-cult


Obligatory psychedelic orgy sequence with kaleiodoscopic lens effect


Frightened Fenech #1

Furthermore the apartment black is also home to all manner of suspicious and suspect neighbours, any one of whom could be the killer, like old lady Moss, with her curious interest in horror comics like Killerman (“To really like horror tales you have to be nuts. She only buys horror tales – if you ask me, she's got something loose up here”) and a reluctance to be, well, neighbourly, or predatory lesbian Sheila Hendricks (Annabella Incontrera), clearly pleased to have two potential new girlfriends in the apartment and possibly not adverse to terrorizing them into her waiting arms...


Frightened Fenech #2


The iconic killer


Mirror, mirror...


...and again...

Known by a plethora of different titles – the more literal translation of Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer as What are those Strange Drops of Blood Doing on Jennifer's Body, the more suggestive Erotic Blue – besides the more mystery-like Case of the Bloody Iris is perhaps the quintessential giallo, the one with everything that aficionados love about the form (well, almost – while the killer's chooses to wear brown surgical gloves he or she makes up for this fashion faux pas by eventually exit by the de rigeur fall from a great height) and which condemns it in the eyes of detractors as stupid, even offensive, trash.




Frightened Fenech #3

It's sleazy, cheesy and, I find at least, a sheer pleasure from start to end in its willingness to shamelessly contrive cliché and stereotype after cliché and stereotype; the production line, known – and knowing - quality of the piece perhaps best summarised by the way the closing scene neatly and needlessly echoes its opening counterpart as another woman goes into a phone booth, makes a call and is invited to “come on up”. Edgar Wallace may have developed the idea of the plot wheel, but on this showing at least it was the Italians who were the most enthusiastic about spinning it again and again...




Lesbian seduction interrupted?

The credits are a who's who of golden age exploitation all'italiana: Luciano Martino produced; Ernesto Gastaldi provided the script and Bruno Nicolai the score, whilst future directors Michele Massimo Tarantini and Stelvio Massi were assistant and cinematographer respectively.

The cast is likewise full of familiar faces, ranging from top-billed Edwige Fenech and George Hilton, playing very much to type as the frightened woman and the suave, shifty suspect / red herring – what trauma lies behind his aversion to blood, or is it just a convenient alibi? – down to reliable support from the likes of Oreste Lionello, as Andreas's campy, bitchy photographer friend; George Rigaud, as Sheila's perpetually violin-scraping father, a dottore in his dotage; or Alan Collins / Luciano Pigozzi, as the sweaty, shifty majordomo of the nightclub where Mizar worked.








Gratuitous shots of Fenech #1 to #4

Perhaps the only thing that the film does not have going for it is the sense of directorial sureness that Sergio Martino would likely have brought to it – I mention him by name precisely because this is a case where we can single the director's contribution out, as a comparison with The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh or All the Colours of the Dark will demonstrate. (Whether this makes Martino an auteur or merely a higher-ranking metteur en scene is another matter, as is whether such critical distinctions really matter in a case like this.)

It's not that spaghetti western specialist Anthony Ascott / Giuliano Carnimeo has an empty bag of tricks, more that what he does at the helm too often comes across as self-conspiously trickery and frippery, deployed without that sense of thought as to what it is actually contributing in terms of visual storytelling. Note, for example, the way in which a complex mirrored composition showing Marilyn and Jennifer say nothing about the duality or duplicity of either character – the former is just too much of the dumb blonde for subtext, the latter a straightforward damsel-in-distress who simply wants to put her past behind her rather than having half-submerged sadomasochistic yearnings like her counterpart in Strange Vice...

Still, precisely because the film doesn't aspire to be art, gives its target audience what they expect and cheerfully owns up to its own raison d'etre (“Andy, what really sells beer, when you come right down to it?” “How should I know? How about alcoholic content?” “No! What sells beer is a bare-assed broad holding a barrel, or a bottle, or a beaker, right here, between the tits... You've got to have a nude in there somewhere!”) it can in the end be said that this really doesn't matter.

Mi Caro Assassino / My Dear Killer

"What happened is unpleasantly obvious, but how and why it happened is something else"

What was ex-insurance investigator Paradisi doing hiring an excavator to nose around in a recently flooded quarry?

Why did his investigations compel someone to have him murdered – decapitation by digger jaw, no less – and then murder the digger operator, Mancini, making it look like he had committed suicide as a traumatised response to the incident?

What relation do the murders bear to an unsolved kidnapping / murder case from last year involving a wealthy industrialist and his young daughter?

These are the questions which the dogged Inspector Peretti (George Hilton) seeks to answer in this 1971 giallo from Tonino Valerii, a director better known for spaghetti westerns like Day of Anger and My Name is Nobody but who, like many talented craftsman, proved his versatility and adaptability within a range of genres.






The titles make you wonder if this is a spaghetti western or a giallo?


But it's a giallo - in which Django can be seen playing on the TV

The key to his success and the key to understanding his work - at least from what I have seen of it - is, I think, a pervasive grown-up sensibility that endeavours to go beyond the lowest common denominator.

Thus, while there are obvious concessions to genre expectations here - quirky and sleazy supporting characters; subjective killers-eye handheld camera and brutal murders by a black-gloved assasin etc. - there is just something different about the way Valerii uses them that raises his work out of the conventional.


Giallo...


... giallo and black gloves...


... and Donald Duck (well, Scrooge McDuck); the child's schoolbook drawing contains a vital clue a la Deep Red

In terms of quirky it's that the elderly couple who cohabit in a shack by the quarry also serve to provide further commentary on the changing gender politics of the time, in that the relationship between Peretti and his own partner Anna is strained not only by his dedication to his work - the cliche of the cop married to the job - but also because she has a career of her own and is unwilling to meekly accede to a traditional anatomy-as-destiny role:

"I suppose I'm being silly, but it's the first time in more than a month you and I have had an evening like this. Like Wanda, the girl who used to come to my place to clean. She worked all day long. Her husband worked all night long. That means for them to have a baby, Luca, things had to give one way or another! We've got to spend more time together, before our relationship is beyond repair."

"You know, you've screwed up our last three evenings together like this. What about when I call?! 'This is an automatic recording: I'm out of the house right now'"

In terms of sleazy it's that we have situations and characters that are too unpleasant and disturbing than to be read as sources of humour, with one supporting character / suspect clearly a paedophile and another the victim of blackmail on account of being caught in flagrante with a 12 year old in a brothel.

In terms of the violence it's not just that it is hard-hitting - the murder of a schoolteacher with a circular saw is particularly wince-inducing - but also that it is shown to have consequences. Oddly, we don't see the murder of the digger operator, only Peretti's reconstruction of what must have happened, while the murder of her husband and daughter has reduced the industrialist's widow, unable to accept the (abject) reality of what has happened to an amnesiac, blank state.






"When they found them they were already in an advanced state of decomposition. The postmortem showed that Allessando Morosi had a fractured skull and had died violently. The girl had died of starvation. Her hands and feet had been tied with wire. It was obvious that she had suffered terribly."

As a murder-mystery the film is perhaps less satisfactory. While there's a nice interplay / dialogue / dialectic between the different detective modes discussed by Todorov, with Peretti's investigations proceeding by an almost literal process of elimination through the killer's remaining one step ahead of him until the Agatha Christie-style denouement in which the inspector assembles all the suspects in a room and forces the guilty individual to reveal their hand, some viewers may find that the detective's moments of insight, as signalled by a sudden insert or zoom, are somewhat heavy-handed and may short circuit our own involvement.




Leaps of induction and deduction abound - from the torn corner of a clue fragment to its source in one shot

Against this, however, we must also note some nice visual touches: the way in which Valerii racks focus through the hood ornament of the killer's car, the BMW logo serving like a kind of gunsight; or the deft way in which one of the numerous flashbacks is introduced the camera panning through the same space to a different time. Those pursuing a psychoanalytic approach to the filone will no doubt find the importance accorded a (circular) mirror within the proceedings to be ripe for interpretation. ("You should take a look at yourself in the mirror," says Anna to Luca; at issue is what this self really is...)

George Hilton proves himself a solid dramatic lead once more, with interest afforded through the way in which he is here playing the hero rather the ambiguous types he so frequently essayed for Sergio Martino and others, although William Berger fans should note that, while second billed, his role is really little more than a cameo. The rest of the cast - Marilu Tolo, Helga Line, Patty Shepard etc. - are typically reliable, whilst the IMDB had Lara Wendel down as playing the kidnapped girl under another name; can anyone confirm?

Ennio Morricone's subdued score, firmly in experimental soundscape mode, is another asset. As is often the case with his work within the filone, it is not necessarily the sort of thing to be listened to in isolation (in both senses of that term) but contributes immensely to the mood of the whole. (As a little gedanken experiment, try imagining the same titles, whose font seems very spaghetti western, with a Morricone score for that genre.)

All told, not quite a masterpiece of the form, but certainly the kind of film that could be used to make the case against its detractors.