In this spaghetti western classic, a frosty cold Lee Van Cleef lays down some hard life lessons via the end of a smoking gun barrel. The setting is a brutal, unforgiving world and Van Cleef fits in fine. He’s a sharpshooting outlaw who passes through a town on his way to collect a debt. Right away, everybody notices this guy and the way that the temperature of the room lowers about twenty degrees when he enters. He’s a killer and you shouldn’t screw around with him—so, of course, a few hotheads screw around with him and then Van Cleef makes lasagna out of them with a few clean shots.
It’s an old story, but this time there’s this other guy in the town, a lowly, floor-sweeping, latrine-cleaning bastard son of a whore (and I mean that literally) who lives on a dog’s wages and gets treated like the town bitch. Give him a couple of pennies and he’ll water your horse and take your verbal abuse. He’s played by Giuliano Gemma, who’s got the squarest jaw of 1967 and looks like a male model, but, okay, sure, he’s the town loser. Let’s go with it. He sees no way out of his shit-bag life until he sees the villainous Van Cleef and the way he walks, talks and commands respect.
Gemma isn’t scared of the bad guy. Gemma wants to BE the bad guy. So he pursues Van Cleef and asks to be taken under his demon wing. With a smirk, Van Cleef obliges, not because he’s gone soft, but because the whole thing amuses him and he knows that he can make this kid do anything.
That poisonous relationship is what this film is about. Gemma chooses a dangerous path, but he still has a soul. Van Cleef lost his soul long ago, if he ever had one. After enough time has passed for the kid to mature, which of the two of them is better equipped to survive this film’s cruel world? And is survival such a great thing in a place like this? Also, is there any way to fight an evil motherfucker without becoming an evil motherfucker yourself? These are a few questions that this film throws into the desert wind.
This is an exciting film that’s not afraid of a little pessimism. It brings a mean streak and a swaggering music score by Riz Ortolani. Director Tonino Valerii came up as Sergio Leone’s assistant director on the first two films of his “Dollars” trilogy and it looks he learned well along the way about how in the movies the desert is a graveyard, life is Hell and our hero just might be the Devil.