The Hellbenders

Another Spaghetti Western directed by Sergio Corbucci is 1967's The Hellbenders ("The Cruel Ones" in the original Italian). It stars Joseph Cotten as the leader of a very small band of confederates looking to resurrect the cause, though it's not precisely clear how he's going to do it.

Cotten, with an anguished look on his face that suggests him thinking, "I've worked with Welles and Hitchcock, what am I doing here?" and his three sons ambush and massacre a convoy of soldiers escorting a large cache of money. With this money Cotten wants to rebuild the Confederacy. He, like Django, is using a coffin as transport, hiding the money in the casket while a woman, presumably a whore picked up in a nearby town, poses as the widow of the invisible body inside.

When they need to replace the woman the "good" son goes to town and finds a card sharp (Norma Bengell). She isn't sure what she's in for, and alternately helps and hinders the ragtag bunch.

As with the other two Corbucci films, The Hellbenders is an okay Western. It has its share of violence--that opening massacre kills off about 30 soldiers--and shows a couple of hangings and an attempted rape in the gritty, nihilistic style that I'm quickly associating with Corbucci. The ending, which results in pretty much everybody dead, is when the film comes close to a poetic tone, as a wounded Cotten struggles to stay on his feet and collapses on a river bank across which is his destination.