Shameless Self Expression

A crooked bank owner (Stephen Zacharias) breaks wrongly convicted Eli Wallach out of jail in exchange for Wallach taking down bounty hunters Cat Stevens (Terence Hill) and Hutch Bessy (Bud Spencer) who he feels previously wronged and humiliated him. He kills the banker instead because the banker had once betrayed him alongside two others, as he then goes in search of the other two men (one played by Kevin McCarthy). Brock Peters turns up briefly as an African-American acrobat who joins up with Cat and Hutch.   A great cast is wasted in this meandering 1968 spaghetti western from writer-director Giuseppe Colizzi ( “God Forgives…I Don’t!” , which is this film’s predecessor). The film has its moments, especially with Bud Spencer and Eli Wallach who are quite funny, but it’s just not a memorable or interesting whole. The story seems awfully thin for it to be given a near epic-length treatment and even then some important characters are barely even featured. Like most spaghetti west...

A jaded mob doctor (James Mason) steals money from a powerful gangster (Dan Duryea), and flees to Mexico with the gangster’s girlfriend (Marta Toren) for good measure. That won’t piss Duryea off at all. William Conrad plays Duryea’s chief henchman, Jack Elam is another thug in Duryea’s employ, and Basil Ruysdael plays a Mexican priest.   Unusual and twisty 1950 Hugo Fregonese (writer of the average spaghetti western “Find a Place to Die” ) crime/noir-drama is full of rock-solid performances and a few surprises throughout, particularly the ending. Scripted by TV veteran Lawrence Kimble (who wrote episodes of “State Trooper” and “Studio 57” ), the film gets off and running pretty quickly, and although the second half does slow down it’s still really interesting stuff. The versatile James Mason is a solid anchor playing an imperfect protagonist who gets his hands quite dirty at times, whilst Dan Duryea is in great form as the confident and powerful gangster who isn’t quite as in ...