Death Rides a Horse

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Ah, the Spaghetti Western. One of the most maligned of genres for the longest time - the kind of movie with the cheesy dubbed dialogue and the American C-Grade stars as leads and the super-slam-blang cartoon violence and the whistling music and the protracted showdowns and the squeaky shrill gunshot noises. Yes, that genre.

I'm not an expert in the Spaghetti subgenre, having only seen 12 films of this genre, 5 of them by Sergio Leone. The fact that I haven't written or at least cross-posted my thoughts on any of Leone's films is a criminal oversight, given that he's the director most responsible for my current state of film buffery. The others, however, haven't generally been my cup of tea. Spaghetti Westerns are a whole world apart from the American Westerns; if American Westerns (at their best) are a filmed novel (as in The Searchers and The Wild Bunch), the Spaghettis, excepting the very few bits of art that transcend the genre's limits of budget and style (eg. Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West) are comic books. They're violent, cartoonish, and often downright weird. And although I'm a genre newbie, I daresay that other than Leone, the genre can't produce anything to compete with Ford, Hawks and Peckinpah's best work. Not that it has to; there are merits to be found in stuff like Sergio Corbucchi's violent shoot-'em-up Django, the horrifically bleak The Great Silence, and the interesting JFK assassination allegory The Price of Power. It's a different style of film altogether, and to compare them to the American classics is just unfair.

Death Rides a Horse, which I gave a first viewing today, is probably the best of the non-Leone Spaghettis I've seen to date. It has a fairly simple revenge plot of the sort that usually drives these pictures. Bill (John Phillip Law) watches a gang of criminals massacre his family, and vows to avenge them once he's all grown up. He finds that many of them have unfortunately taken up respectable positions in society; Kavanaugh (Anthony Dawson), for instance, is a successful casino owner, while Walcott (Luigi Pistilli) is a banker and businessman. And yet they still retain some of the old ways, stockpiling arms, henchmen and nefarious schemes. Also looking for revenge, albeit for a different reason, is Ryan (Lee Van Cleef), a former gang member of the abovementioned. He and Bill work towards the same goal, but refuse to work together until the final showdown becomes imminent. Will Bill learn the secret of Ryan's past? Will all the right guys get shot? (Well, this isn't a Corbucchi film, so I think that's a fair assumption.) Will the sun rise tomorrow?

Director Giulio Petroni gives an excellent production that has considerably more maturity and style than most of its ilk. There is very little cartoonish nonsense that plagued far too many Spaghettis - the film is able to go ten minutes between shootouts, the characters and their motivations are decently developed, there aren't pools of blood and gore or ridiculous gadgets that would make James Bond roll his eyes (although there's a lot of derringer-pulling). The film starts off with a nightmarish nighttime massacre, a pace setter than the film doesn't always live up to but maintains the spirit of. It's full of nice moments of odd humor - Lee Van Cleef shooting a door shut, the simultaneous firing of Van Cleef's loaded and Law's empty gun in a shootout. There are many visually striking sequences, including. The movie has the usual annoying canned dialogue - inevitable when dubbing occurs - and the flashbacks are a bit overdone, but these are fairly minor quibbles. Ennio Morricone contributes an interesting score, making use of choir, guitar and panflute, although he liberally recycles his saloon themes from For a Few Dollars More.

The movie's biggest flaw is John Phillip Law (RIP). I've seen Law in several films already (the weird and not-very-good Mario Bava comic book flick Diabolik and the atrocious MST3K fodder Space Mutiny come to mind), and he's in the same league as Orlando Bloom, Keanu Reeves and Ryan O'Neal so far as I'm concerned. His usual stiffness is mitigated by his bizarre casting as a homespun gunslinger; stuffed into overalls with suspenders ("How can you trust a man who wears both a belt AND suspenders?"), he gives off a bizarre twang that sounds like an atrocious John Wayne impression, and is fed atrocious lines by the script (my favorite being "You got any place where you can keep the womenfolk and younguns' safe?"). It's like if For a Few Dollars More had starred Ryan O'Neal instead of Clint Eastwood. Now there's a horrifying prospect for you...

What really drives the film more than anything else is Lee Van Cleef. The star of Leone's For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, this long-time character actor (who had appeared in such Hollywood flicks as High Noon, The Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Tin Star, It Conquered the World, China Gate, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance for years with little recognition). His lean, menacing hawk-like face, his gravelly voice, bushy mustache and leathery fingers (one missing a tip) lend a weight and menace to any character he plays, making him an ideal type-cast baddie. But Leone cast him as the kindly, father figure Colonel Mortimer, and Ryan is very much in the character's mould. Van Cleef gives a solid performance, playing his part with panache, charisma, toughess, and a decidedly dry sense of humor, more than balancing out his abysmal co-star. (I should also mention, if only briefly, the great villain turns by veteran Spaghetti bad guys Luigi Pistilli, Mario Brega and Anthony Dawson.)

Death Rides a Horse is a very good if not quite great film. If all Spaghettis were half as good as this flick, they'd have a much better reputation. Then again, that depends on the willingness of critics to give Spaghettis a fair shake... Don't hold your breath for that one.

Rating: 7/10 - Recommended