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Nineteenth-century Utah by way of Andalusia, Lucio Fulci on the American Western. "I don't know anything about heroes." The cardsharp (Fabio Testi) arrives in town just in time for a sheriff-sanctioned massacre, he survives by paying the lawman and sharing a cell with a trio of fellow outcasts. Then it's off into the desert with pregnant prostitute (Lynne Frederick), gnomish sot (Michael J. Pollard) and grinning lunatic (Harry Baird), "no devils, four little aces." The wild card is the scraggly sharpshooter (Tomas Milian) who invites himself to their pilgrimage, his specialty is carnage so richly relished that even the morbid loon wants nothing to do with him. A high angle gives the pious caravan from Ford's Wagon Master, whose leader shrugs when asked about their plan in case of an ambush: "Then it's Heaven for us." (The camera later zooms out from a gore-stained Bible to contemplate their decimated camp.) Grubby flats, inane folk ballads, peyote mirages. "You won't find anything like this in a saloon." One man's agonizing demise is another man's ecstasy in a cemetery under a downpour, a matter of letting the dead bury the dead. A tin star pinned to a bare chest, a knife digging a bullet out of a thigh, a face turned into a tangle of blood and hay and shaving cream—that's expected from Fulci. What's unexpected is the poignancy he brings to the journey as the battered heroine gives birth in a snowy hamlet only to expire in a derivation from 3 Godfathers. (Like the hulking gunslinger who leads the celebration, the filmmaker nurses hope in a barbaric world grudgingly, almost ashamedly.) "We'll leave him with his ghosts." With Adolfo Lastretti, Bruno Corazzari, Giorgio Trestini, and Donal O'Brien.
--- Fernando F. Croce |