Day of Anger

Leone protege Tonino Valerii's Day of Anger (1967) is a pretty typical Spaghetti Wstern, with the requisite shootouts, revenge plot and double-crosses, and only a smattering of originality. Although it has a cool Lee Van Cleef (a redundancy if ever there was one) and some nice action scenes, it's otherwise pretty paint-by-numbers.

Shady gunslinger-with-a-past Frank Talby (Lee Van Cleef) rides into the Western town of Clifton with a mission. He has a grudge against Clifton's "respectable" citizenry, enlisting local stable boy Scott Mary (Giulliano Gemma) as a sidekick. Talby guns down his old partner Wild Jack (Al Muloch) and prepares for a showdown with Clifton's citizens, particularly the banker Turner (Ennio Balbo) and Judge Cutchell (Lukas Ammann) - all while teaching Scott the tricks of the gunfighter's trade.

Day of Anger's plot is pretty banal, fusing two Western cliches - the old-gun-trains-young pup, the standard Spaghetti revenge plot - without a lot of success or originality. The film is very talky for a Spaghetti, which is a problem considering the usual clunky dubbing and fortune-cookie wisdom disguised as tough talk. The plot progression and character development are pretty obvious from the get-go; even the Batman Begins-style twist - with the mentor turning into the villain - doesn't add much to the film. And the climax where "the student becomes the teacher" (reciting Talbee's lessons while gunning down his gang!) is painfully obvious and obnoxious.

Valerii's direction is generally good; he handles his cast well and stages the action scenes with aplomb. The photography of Almerian locations (including many from Leone's For a Few Dollars More) is quite striking. Riz Ortolani's score, however, is fairly generic, sounding too much like a '60s TV theme song at times. The movie has its share of well-staged shootouts - most notably, the horseback muzzle-loading duel between Van Cleef and veteran Spaghetti bad guy Benito Stefanelli. This is an inventive and brilliantly-staged sequence, that really should have been the climax rather than a random action scene halfway through the film.

Lee Van Cleef is his usual badass self - we're at the point where noting such about him is redundant - but Giulliano Gemma, star of A Pistol For Ringo and Valerii's The Price of Power, is a wet noodle - he's too clean-cut and frankly wimpy to cut it as a Western tough guy. The rest of the cast is pretty bland, aside from familiar faces Benito Stefanelli, Jose Calvo (A Fistful of Dollars) and Al Muloch (Once Upon a Time in the West) in larger-than-usual roles.

Day of Anger is, overall, a disappointing film given its fairly high reputation in Spaghetti circles. It's watchable, with a few nice individual scenes, but nothing that hasn't been done better elsewhere.