When a Red Army detachment captures Sultan Mazar, the brains behind the Bazmachi contingent, a decision is made to escort urgently the prisoner to the Bukhara province. The difficult mission is entrusted to a grizzled mountain trapper and conscientious revolutionary called Mirzo. His expertise is essential to traverse the precarious paths and steep mountain ridges along the way, impossible terrain for the inexperienced. Read More »
Plot:
Infirm Thomas Felton (Leslie Daniels) tells his young wife Samantha (Rosalba Neri) that
he wants his nephew Johnny Yuma (Mark Damon) to run their ranch. Samantha responds by having her brother Pedro (Louis Vanner/Luigi Vannucchi) bump Felton off. She then blames a fall-guy for Felton’s death and employs her ex-lover-cum-bounty killer, Lawrence Jerome Carradine (Lawrence Dobkin), to shoot the patsy down. When it transpires that Felton has actually willed the ranch to his nephew, Samantha instructs both Carradine and Pedro and his men to eliminate Johnny.Read More »
The adopted son of a preacher comes upon a village that is under the thumb of a deranged ex-Confederate officer, who is – among other things – stealing land from the locals with phony land grants.Read More »
Don Murray stars as a humble cowboy with aspirations for bigger things. He borrows money from his dance-hall girlfriend Lee Remick to buy a ranch, then dumps Remick in favor of banker’s daughter Patricia Owens. Murray runs for political office, and in so doing is compelled to join a posse in search of his best friend Stuart Whitman, who has turned rustler. Anxious not to compromise his climb to the top, Murray stands by in silence as Whitman is lynched. In the end, however, Murray regains his essential decency when he is shot while trying to protect his ex-girlfriend Remick from bullying land baron Richard Egan. Based on a novel by A. B. Guthrie Jr., These Thousand Hills may look and sound like a western, but it has “film noir” written all over it. – Hal EricksonRead More »
A peace-loving, part-time sheriff in the small town of Firecreek must take a stand when a gang of vicious outlaws takes over his town.Read More »
Edoardo Mulargia’s El Puro (1969; a.k.a. The Reward’s Yours… The Man’s Mine), western icon Robert Woods (My Name is Pecos) gives arguably his greatest performance as a legendary gunfighter forced to emerge from hiding after the bounty hunters on his tail murder the tender-hearted barmaid (Rosalba Neri, Smile Before Death) who offered him a new life.Read More »
Sam Shepard’s revisionist 1994 Western, the final release featuring late actor River Phoenix, combines elements of baroque Japanese ghost films like Onibaba with traditional stylistic conventions of John Ford.
Storyline:
It’s 1873, Indian Territory. Talbot Roe is going mad with grief over losing his Indian wife, Awbonnie. In an effort to save him, his father, Prescott Roe, seeks to purchase the dead wife’s sister, Velada, from the same traveling carnival he acquired Awbonnie. The girls’ father, carnival master Eamon McCree, is willing to do business, but her step-brother, Reeves, protests, putting an end to the negotiation. Desperate, Prescott kidnaps Velada and promises her the means to be rid of her father in return for comforting Talbot out of his obsession. In Talbot’s madness, he guards his wife’s corpse, preventing her from passing to the beyond. As a result, Awbonnie’s ghost begins haunting and cursing everyone involved in the transaction of selling her as a wife. Meanwhile, Reeves and Eamon search the prairie for Velada…Read More »
“This goofy, delightfully sophomoric British spoof on spaghetti westerns was made for only $15,000 and that, along with the booming faux-Morricone score, only heightens the humor. Filmed in lush, green southwestern England (doubling for arid New Mexico), it chronicles the exploits of taciturn hero No Name and his stereotypical Indian side-kick Running Sore as they search for the nefarious villain The Squint.” – All Movie GuideRead More »
