This film’s terrific style, a curious blend of Gothic shadows and candelabrum (and a villain with a look modeled after Dracula) with Western movie sweat and gunplay, saves it from being too preachy. If you’re not interested, you don’t have to care at all that director Carlo Lizzani was a Communist devotee and that he cast outspoken fellow Red, Pier Paolo Pasolini as a pacifist priest. Lizzani made a good movie beyond that. It’s a richly eccentric Italian-made lasagna of violence, revenge and a nebulous sort of mysticism.
Our hero is a man protected by GOD. In fact, every time ruggedly handsome Lou Castel kills one of the bad guys, he says a prayer for them right afterward. He’s blessed right from the beginning. Despite taking a bullet to his prepubescent head, he survives the massacre of his entire collectivist-minded Mexican village by land-seizing capitalists. He’s then found wandering the desert by devout Catholics who take him in and raise him as their own. When he, now all grown up, goes out to rescue their daughter from the clutches of a prostitution racket, he’s a miraculously amazing shot from the very FIRST instance that he picks up a gun. By the time he survives an ambush in the hills because the Bible in his coat pocket stops a bullet (that old gag), we know we’re in Crazy Land. Each scene is a fresh hit off a bong. Only the most staunch will still be interested in a political debate.
It’s one of the curious movie traditions that the western is the primary genre of Leftist subversion. This goes back to the 1950s, when Hollywood’s most pointed anti-McCarthy moments on film all came with cowboy hats and six-shooters (Johnny Guitar, Silver Lode). It’s a pretty good disguise. The Italians got in on it, too. Here’s a good, offbeat example.