A bit more backlog-clearing now – here’s some more spaghetti Westerns rereleased in recent years by Arrow Video, a Lee Van Cleef number and the first two movies in the long-running Sartana series.
Day of Anger
Whilst Clint Eastwood went to Hollywood after his association with Sergio Leone made him an international star, Lee Van Cleef continued working in Italian Westerns for a good chunk of time off the back of his performances in For A Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Here he plays Frank Talby, a gunfighter who rides into the town of Clifton, Arizona and shoots Hart Perkins (Romano Puppo). As it turns out, Clifton is a town of haves and have-nots, and the have-nots are ruthlessly derided and kept down by the haves. Among the have-nots is Scott Mary (Guiliano Gemma), an impoverished lad who never knew his parents; his mother was a prostitute at the local brothel, his father some unknown customer of hers, and the fine people in town look down on such a heritage.
Young Scott is mighty impressed by Talby’s fancy shooting, and has always dreamed of being a gunfighter himself; it doesn’t hurt that Perkins was one of those who made a point of bullying Scott and his sidelined friends. When Talby moves on, Scott persuades him to take him with him and teach him the finer points of the art of gunfighting, which Scott takes to strongly (having been trained in some basics by Murph (Walter Rilla), a retired gunslinger who runs the local stable and has given Scott his rusted-up old sidearm (but no ammo) to practice his draw for fun.
It turns out, however, that Talby might not be the positive father figure that Scott is clearly looking for here. For Talby is here to track down Wild Jack (Al Mulock), a former colleague of his, who owes him $50,000 from a robbery the pair participated in a while back. As it turns out, Wild Jack lost the money after the town leaders of Clifton swindled him out of it – and so Talby decides to mount a coup of the town. All well and good – but when Talby becomes a tyrant in his own right and ends up shooting Murph, who’s just trying to keep the peace, a collision course is set between Talby and Scott…
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 