Death Rides a Horse

I end my Spaghetti Western festival with the one I think is the best of the lot--Death Rides a Horse, from 1967, directed by Giulio Petroni, very much in the style of Sergio Leone, even down to the close-ups of eyes.

The film is a tale of revenge, times two. We start with a gang massacring a family, leaving one survivor--a little boy, who grows up to be John Phillip Law, who spends fifteen years honing his skill as a gunfighter to get his revenge. We also see a prisoner (Lee Van Cleef) being released after fifteen years on a chain gang. He is also after revenge, from the men who set him up and betrayed him. Of course these two are after the same gang.

This is a wonderful film for those who love Western tropes, from shootouts in a dust storm to fast-draw contests to a man being buried up to his neck and left in the hot sun. The villains are oily (Anthony Dawson as a gambler is particularly repellent) and the good guys are true blue. Yes, Van Cleef is paying a good guy, sort of, and though he wants to get his revenge alone, he and Law come to a begrudging respect for each other.

Spaghetti Westerns didn't really change the Western, but they did take what was then a tired genre, which had been made so ubiquitous by TV, and re-invented it. They inspired today's filmmakers, most notably Quentin Tarantino, for good or for ill. But I must say, after seeing eight or nine of these films over the last few weeks I've had my fill for a long while.