Blood's Thicker than Plot
At least George Hilton wasn't in it...

Whoo, boy!

I still haven't gotten One Damned Day at Dawn (though I'm betting Fred over at Luminous) won't let me down, but I did get my other Spaghetti Western in the mail, Mille Dollari sul Nero (aka. Blood at Sundown).

To be honest, I wasn't really in the mood to watch anything, but I owed a guy on eBay a feedback for this thing so I fired it up. An hour and forty minutes later, I was ready to tell him that his product was fine. I did, however, have some different feelings about the movie.

Ahh the danger of buying stuff blind.

We'll head this off with the title that' s on the DVD box. I always think that's fair.

Blood at Sundown (Mille Dollari sul Nero, 1966, d. Alberto Cardone)

The Story (near as I can figure): Johnny Liston returns after a 12 year jail sentence for a murder he didn't commit only to find his brother Sartana in control of the town, Johnny's girlfriend, and an army of outlaws. Sartana's brutality with the locals doesn't sit well with Johnny who begins a crusade to get the townsfolk to overthrow his brother.

The Review: Where to begin?

Well, at roughly an hour and forty minutes, this was a pretty long spaghetti. Usually only the most operatic stories (most of those being directed by the genre masters) run over an hour and a half. Now this one did, and yet the story never seemed to get thicker than a piece of paper. Seriously, it's only because I've seen enough of these things that I could just string it along for myself. Otherwise, this one belongs well in the realm of head scratchers.

And yet, unlike most movies like that, it's somehow watchable. I just don't know why...

Now, Anthony Steffen (nee Antonio De Teffe), who plays Johnny Liston, has often been accused, at least in his Spaghetti Western career, of doing a bad Clint Eastwoon impression. It's easy to see. Steffen squints a lot. He has a similar hard angular face with about the same amount of stubble. And he's a fairly tall and slender fella. In this one, he seems to do a fair job in not just being a knockoff, but then any "performance" he might have given was generally ruined by the terrible English dialogue that was dubbed in for him (and all the characters for that matter). Still, all in all, not a wholly unlikeable hero....well, we'll get back to that.

If Steffen is doing his best Clint, then Gianni Garko, who plays Sartana, has to be doing his best Klaus Kinski. Garko spends the whole movie wild-eyed with furrowed brow, and is rarely anything less than crazed for a moment. Now of course, Garko is perhaps most famous for his role as a different Sartana in the popular Giuliano Carnimeo western series. I imagine that in much the same way as any movie with Franco Nero became a Django movie, Garko became Sartana with this movie's English dub. Anyhow, this moodswinging psychopath is almost the absolute antithesis of the too calm and cool Sartana that Garko made famous. (Of course the only one I didn't like was the one with Hilton as Sartana. Quel surprise...)

Now, as individual characters, Johnny and Sartana stand up ok. They've each got at least one dimension, and are almost bordering on a second. But most of the plot revolves around their being brothers, and the one element they keep returning to is how they won't kill one another because they're brothers. Nothing, however, is really done to cement the relationship between them. They never act overly brotherly to one another. At the very least, if I came home and found my woman married to my brother, and my brother killing everyone in my hometown...and the fact that it's kinda obvious that Sartana committed the murder that got Johnny sent up in the first place...I'd probably have to take him out. But....

There is the mother character. Now it's established that part of why they won't just blow each other away is their mother. Now she pretends not care for Johnny, but she obviously does which we're shown in little hints. She does support Sartana because of his strength and power, but doesn't seem to exactly love him. Now she seems loony enough on her own, but eventually she recognizes Sartana's insanity and turns against him. This results in her existence as a roadblock between the brothers being eliminated, and the inevitable showdown is underway. Like so many things in the story, the mother appears to have a backstory that's never explored (we're never sure why she has such a huge chip on her shoulder against the town), and she's just not around enough to explain anymore as to why the brothers won't go after each other because of her.

The movie also has an array of subplots that again aren't explored. Johnny's tie to his girlfriend who is now Sartana's wife is never really explored. Jerry, Johnny's mute assistant, has a side story of sorts, but we learn the details too late...and they don't seem to make any sense. Oh...right, and it's never explained who this guy was that Johnny was accused of killing...and why so much of the story seems to revolve around it in one way or another.

Now the copy I got in the mail wasn't the clearest, but you could tell that the movie looked well shot. At the same time, though, particularly in fight scenes, there are all these strange close up jumpcuts. Many of the shots were well composed and quite moody. Of particular note is the dolly shot of the boy's mother stalking through the bullet strewn streets to stop Sartana's bloody rampage on the town. In fact the movie has a disjointed string of atmospheric moments, interesting aspects, or cool scenes. There just isn't anything to hold all of it together. Which results in an ending...that well...you just have to see it all to understand...

Very high on the WTF factor.

I would say that it was like watching a train wreck...but it worked better than most movies that seem like that. It was just another one of those where you just wish that it could have all come together better. With what it has going for it, you just wish it could've been a solid cohesive movie: a gothic tale of two brothers torn between their blood and their mutual hatred held off by a witchly matriarch. Beautiful...or at least it could've been.

Certainly the gothic angle was played up better in Margheriti's And God Said to Cain (1970) or in the Steffen vehicle The Stranger's Gundown (aka Django the Bastard, 1969).

Not the worst I've seen by any means...but man...I just wanted it to work...

Cheers.