THE PHANTOM RIDER (1946)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* 

Although the 1946 PHANTOM RIDER is mostly a by-the-numbers "costumed cowboy" serial, it has some points that elevate it above the level of the routine. 

For one thing, it has nothing to do with the Universal chapterplay of the same title, which was essentially just another outre-outfit oater. In that 1936 offering, Buck Jones just donned an all-white outfit, possibly with the idea of suggesting that he was ghostly, like The Ghost Rider of the comics, who appeared in 1949. In the 1946 serial, Doctor Jim Sterling (Robert Kent) ends up donning a costume designed to make him look like an ancient Indian spirit, consisting of buckskins, a feathered headdress, and a rubber mask covering his entire face, purportedly to make others think that he's Indian. The Rider never fools any white villains into thinking him a spirit, though a good number of the local Indians-- never given a tribal name-- apparently can't tell red-hued rubber from crimson flesh.

For the other thing, RIDER possesses some good progressive (back when that word meant something) political content. Easterner Sterling is on his way to become the doctor to a small western town, whose name might be Big Tree, like the nearby Indian reservation. On his way to town in a buckboard, Sterling gives a lift to Blue Feather (George J. Lewis), the college-educated son of the Indians' chief. Blue Feather provides exposition about how he educated himself so that he could improve the lot of his people in living in the white man's world, especially in dealing with the bandits menacing both the whites and the Indians. Blue Feather's main ambition is to create an Indian police force, vetted by the federal government and with the power to arrest the lawless. Sterling shows his approval of this lofty goal-- and within the first chapter, gets direct evidence of bandit predations. Blue Feather is wounded and sidelined, so the noble doctor decides to take over the young Indian's mission. With the help of schoolmarm Doris (Peggy Stewart), Sterling decides to assume the appearance of an ancient Indian savior, The Phantom Rider, to convince the Indians to follow the white man's way of fighting oppression.

As in the 1938 LONE RANGER serial, the bandits are hiding under the cloak of counterfeit authority. Local Indian agent Carson (LeRoy Mason) is not the real person assigned to the post, but an otherwise unnamed schemer using the position to coordinate his gang's activities. The Rider pops up and starts preying on the predators, they try to stop him, rinse and repeat. 

Despite a cool setup, RIDER falls into a lot of pedestrian situations, with no memorable cliffhangers and mostly gun-action. According to THE FILES OF JERRY BLAKE, the hero's rubber-mask disguise had a restrictive effect on what both Robert Kent and any doubles could do in fight-scenes. But the photography here is much crisper, and thus more involving, than in many later serials, so RIDER always looks good even if one has seen the same business a dozen times before. The story would have gained some heft had it built up conflicts between Sterling's profession and his avocation, or the character of Schoolmarm Doris. JERRY BLAKE liked the comedy relief of "Nugget," a grizzled miner, but he didn't do anything for me. The villains are also ordinary and no better than they have to be, and the formation of the Indian police force comes about a little too easily. I'm glad I had the chance to see it but will probably not watch it again. I suppose Bad Progressives would sneer at the serial for placing a "white savior" in charge, but to me it makes a world of difference when the savior, whatever his race, is helping others save themselves         

GONE WITH THE WEST (1969/1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

In 2012 I did a quickie review of this film, but on rewatching it this year, I decided to write a new one. After I finish this one I'll delete the previous version.

By all accounts director Bernard Girard completed this western, starring James Caan and Stephanie Powers, under a different title in 1969, when the influence on Italian spaghetti westerns on American cinema was at its height. It was finally released in 1974, probably to play off Caan's rising star, and then recut with a frame story and re-released under the title LITTLE MOON AND JUD MCGRAW. Over time a lot of fans have dubbed GONE as one of the worst westerns of all time. However, while it isn't good, it did pick up on the social anomie seen in the original Sergio Leone movies, and formulated the same basic situation seen in 1973's HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER-- that of a pitiless avenger destroying a corrupt town-- long before HPD went into production. I imagine there were other possible ancestors for both. not least Dashiell Hammett's 1929 RED HARVEST.

Also, GONE is not an adventure-story as I previously labeled it, but an irony, just like DRIFTER. One or two IMDB reviews complained of tonal changes in GONE, when it seemed to shift between comedy and ultraviolent adventure. But GONE is an irony, in which everything is meant to have a double meaning. I'm not saying GONE is a good or incisive irony, the way that DRIFTER is. But a lot of the tropes I identified as "fallacious figments"-- like the cutesy end-scene where Caan's character Jed shoots the film's cameraman-- are meant to convey a pseudo-artsy sense that anything-can-happen. 

The flick begins mundanely enough, with Jed being released from prison for some unspecified crime. His mental flashbacks tell us that he holds a man named Nimmo (Aldo Ray) responsible for his sufferings, as well as for the murder of Jed's wife and child. Jed makes a beeline for the unnamed town where Nimmo rules with an iron hand. Jed watches from afar while the corrupt townsfolk carry on at a cockfight, and pitilessly watch as a young Indian female, Little Moon (Powers), is raped. Later Little Moon retreats to a craggy area overlooking the town, where Jed has made his camp.

Jed watches as Little Moon washes herself in a mountain lake. He doesn't watch her nude display too long, for he announces himself by tossing a rock in the water. Moon gets dressed and attacks him, only to be dissuaded by a threatening fist. But because he doesn't show any desire to rape her, she starts hanging out with him, even though she only speaks Spanish. 

Jed makes a few opening assaults on Nimmo's henchmen. This doesn't seem to upset Nimmo, though one of his cronies seeks out the ridge-area. This guy does try to rape Moon, claiming he didn't get his chance earlier. We then get another "fallacious figment" as Jed comes down like Tarzan, swinging down on a rope attached to who-knows-what. Nevertheless, Moon gets the victory because she just happens to have a sling and kills the rapist with a stone.

The rest of the film is just, as others have said, just a smorgasbord of incoherent violent scenes, though one does have the distinction of being among the best catfights in cinema. In short, Nimmo's regular hooker-girlfriend (Barbara Werle) takes objection when another whore (Elizabeth Leigh) tries to get with Nimmo. It's a really well choreographed fight, and I like to think the participants were doing their best to boost their careers as stuntwomen with this big fight. On a minor note, Sammy Davis Jr has a few scenes as a slick gunfighter employed by Nimmo, but Davis has no real impact on the story.

Jed and Moon attack the town with rocks flung by catapults that they whipped up out of nothing. Then Nimmo's men find and capture Jed, which is the first time Nimmo even learns who his nemesis. He's tied to a cross in the center of town, but Moon comes to his rescue, riding into town and lassoing the cross, so as to drag it away. No one seems able to pursue her. Finally Moon somehow devises a kite from which she can drop sticks of dynamite (how?) on the town. This clears out all the corrupt maggots and makes possible a final fatal clash between Jed and Nimmo. Then the triumphant hero kisses his damsel before they walk toward the horizon-- aside from shooting the cameraman, that is.

Though it's naturalistic aside from the injection of "figments" you're not supposed to believe in, the arty approach still places GONE in my category of "weird westerns."      

HOLY GHOST AND THE FIVE MAGNIFICENT SCOUNDRELS (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological* 

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

This spaghetti western-- the third of three by director Roberto Mauri, apparently all copying from this Gianni Garko vehicle-- just barely qualifies for uncanny status. But this time the uncanny phenomenality stems not from the hero; whatever "Spirito Santo" might have been in the first two films, here he's just a standard ingenious cowpoke, and his spiritual name connotes his general goodness-- though he's not really much more noble than a dozen other Sabata-types.

Santo (Vassili Karis, playing the role in all three Mauri movies) is called upon to stop an elusive arms dealer, The Loner, who goes about in an all-black costume. The guy hiring Santo-- I didn't catch his name-- compares the Loner to the Scarlet Pimpernel, though the Pimpernel wasn't in print until the stage play came out in 1903. Santo also has a meet-cute with the official's cousin Elizabeth (Daria Norman), but she has so little to do with the main story that halfway through I suspected she was the Loner, who's on the small side. Anyway, Santo thinks he needs to engage the services of the five "scoundrels" of the title, all of whom had odd but not memorable idiosyncracies (one thinks he's a pirate, the other a priest-- that sort of thing). I have to admit that because these characters burn up a lot of screen time, that makes the original Italian title much more appropriate than the current streaming title, "Gunmen and the Holy Ghost."

So Santo gets involved with various side-characters, all tedious, and only toward the end does the film work back around to preventing the Loner's scheme, which to hijack some gold. Santo and his goons kill the Loner, who is unmasked as the town sheriff. In a "big reveal" scene that FIVE does nothing to set up, Santo figures out that his boss is behind the Loner's activities, and that the sheriff was just a pawn. The boss is also jealous of Santo's attentions to Elizabeth, who, the boss also reveals, is not really his cousin, and that he plans to marry her. Providentially, even though the big boss has Santo dead to rights, Elizabeth shoots him dead. However, then it's revealed that Elizabeth was also in the big scheme, and she gets killed in a shootout with a deputy. So why, if they both knew they weren't cousins, did they perpetuate the fiction? Because the screenwriter was drunk or ill or stupid, I guess. I've seen more boring spaghettis than this one, though whenever the "scoundrels" were on the screen I stopped paying attention. Oh, one exception-- one guy's a conman who claims that he got jailed because he was selling a miracle cream that enlarged women's breasts-- but which had a deleterious effect if the cream got rubbed off on a man's chest.              

THE WILD WILD WEST: "THE NIGHT OF THE UNDEAD" (1968)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

The four seasons of THE WILD WILD WEST were replete with all sorts of "wild" supernormal phenomena, almost always explained through the rationale of "the scientific-Gothic;" that someone came up with a new scientific discovery that emulated the effect of a supernatural phenomenon. In "Night of the Undead," though, writer Calvin Clements Jr-- a long-time TV scribe-- also throws in a plot with a strong sense of Gothic transgression.

West and Gordon (Robert Conrad, Ross Martin) are in New Orleans, on some vague government mission to protect a valuable scientist, Armbruster. Armbruster disappears and West has an encounter with what seems to be a voodoo ceremony. One of the worshippers, a bulky fellow (Rosie Grier), tosses West around and initially seems unharmed by a gunshot. Later the agents find the man's dead body and take a medallion off him. This device is simply present to give Gordon an excuse to pursue a separate course with his disguise-antics (more on which later), while West chases down the main thread of the story. Fortunately for him, Armbruster's old colleague Eddington (John Zaremba) happens to live in the same city where the agents were to meet Armbruster, so West interviews him. West also encounters Mariah (Joan Delaney), whom he saw earlier at the voodoo ceremony, apparently as a worshipper, seen walking barefoot over burning coals. Eddington mentions that he and Armbruster once worked with a disgraced scientist, Articulus, against whom they planned to bring charges of illegal experimentation. However, Articulus supposedly died in a lab accident. West keeps snooping around and ends up a captive in the house of the supposedly dead scientist. More specifically, he ends up beneath the house, in a mine where Articulus (Hurd Hatfield) maintains a small workforce of men-- including Armbruster-- enslaved by a potion that makes them as will-less as zombies. (That word is never used, though strangely West uses the term "robots" many years before it was invented in the 20th century.)      

   I'm not sure where writer Clements might've got the name of Articulus, which obviously suggests the word "articulate." Possibly Clements was being ironic, since what Articulus does is to render all of his slaves "inarticulate"-- including his new acquisition Mariah, who's now under his control and whom he plans to marry. (If he had her under his control enough to make her participate in a voodoo ceremony, why'd he let her go back to her father? I guess so that she'd be around when West got the first part of the story from Eddington.) The second part of the story, as Articulus helpfully provides, is that after he faked his death, he also allowed his bereaved fiancee to think him dead. Eddington then moved in and convinced the fiancee to marry him instead. Since the mother is absent and is meant to have passed on, Mariah is the naughty scientist's way of possessing the mother, through the daughter. However, Articulus also has in his service an age-appropriate housekeeper-confidante, with the odd name of "Phalah," and Phalah is clearly in love with Articulus and resents his plan to consummate his lost nuptials with a younger woman. 

Gordon dons two disguises in his endeavors. While in the first disguise, he flashes the medallion around in a tavern. This results in Gordon being directed to a certain house by a young Black woman named Domino, who plays no further role in the story. Maybe she was a contact between the all-White gang of the scientist and the Blacks who were helping Articulus perpetrate some voodoo illusion for unspecified reasons. That alliance might also explain her name, since a domino is both white and black. The house in New Orleans is never really explained, but that's where Gordon encounters Phalah, who feels the bumps on his head and gives every impression of her being a student of phrenology. There seems no particular reason for Phalah, if she was just a housekeeper, to be living in town, so it may be that she set up the phrenology shop as a way of maintaining contact with other agents in New Orleans. Does her practice of phrenology have anything to do with her collaboration with a guy who messes with brains? Quien sabe? 

Anyway, Phalah sends Gordon on to the house of Articulus and also sends a subordinate to tail the disguised agent. But apparently Gordon loses the tail, for the agent next shows up at the scientist's house in a different disguise. But Phalah is there too, and she recognizes Gordon by the bumps on his head. The two agents are imprisoned together but inevitably work their Bond-mojo, escape, liberate the villain's enslaved minions, and blow up the house. But this time West doesn't get to kill the villain. While West struggles with the demented scientist, Phalah gets fed up with Articulus' wedding plans and shoots him, causing him to fall to his death. 

One detail I omitted from the episode's "cold open" is that West sees the mesmerized Mariah wield a machete and chop down a dummy made up to resemble her father Eddington. The script never states outright that Articulus plans to have Mariah kill her father, but this too sets up reverberations with early Gothic prose fiction. The prototypical Gothic plot is that of a young woman menaced by an older man, sometimes a symbolic substitution for a "bad father." "Undead" presents Mariah as being caught between "good father" Eddington and "bad father" Articulus, and this time the latter's relationship is not entirely symbolic, given that Mariah could have been Articulus's daughter had he married her mother. If one took Eddington out of the equation, "Undead" could be the story of a natural daughter menaced by her transgressive daddy, but willing to fend him off with a deadly weapon in self-defense. Additionally, Phalah could be replaced with a genuine, and very censorious, mother, who's out to kill the bad dad for his unwholesome pursuits-- and maybe for finding the daughter more attractive than the mother. For a voodoo story set in New Orleans, "Undead" has far less to do with race than with incestuous sexuality. (It's also one of the few episodes where James West doesn't get to romance even a single female.)

            

BIG CALIBRE (1935)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                               The best thing about this routine B-western is the villain's use of a "diabolical device" to commit murder. While cowboy Bob Neal (played by sound-alike performer Bob Steele) is away from home, Bob's father is robbed and killed. But the killer, instead of simply shooting the father, uses a smoldering corrosive chemical in a jar to suffocate the victim. Neal and the sheriff examine the curious weapon-- to whose fumes they're also exposed-- and decide to ask local assayer Otto Zenz (William Quinn), the only guy in town who knows chemistry, to analyze the substance. They stumble across the fact that Zenz is the killer, but he escapes using the smoking chemical concoction again. Zenz doesn't go far; he hides out in some podunk town nearby, using a comical disguise to establish a new identity. (Maybe he didn't manage to get away with the dough he stole?) Neal goes looking for the killer but only stumbles across him by accident, in the process of getting accused of a separate murder of the father of your standard pretty young thing. Finally, at the climax Zenz tries to kill Neal with that smoking acid but of course he fails while the hero survives. I suppose this setup is mildly preferable to sitting through a tedious mystery about some mystery killer's true identity, but since the viewer already knows the villain's ID, the whole middle portion is a waste of time even for a B-western.   

THE MARK OF ZORRO (1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*, 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*                                                                                                                          Director Don McDougall, whose long list of TV episodes includes some very nice work for shows like RAWHIDE and Classic TREK, probably had to make the best of things when he drew this assignment. He had to take the script for the 1940 MARK OF ZORRO, one of the most sumptuous swashbucklers of the Classical Hollywood era and squish its plot and action down into about 75 minutes. Still, enough of the mythic aspects of the 20th-Century Fox version of Zorro come through that I can give this 1974 MARK a fair rating.                                                                                                       

 The telefilm's best asset is star Frank Langella in the dual role of Zorro and his foppish civilian ID Diego Vega. The actor had to follow closely in the shoes of Tyrone Power, but I thought he gave both characters as much mojo as anyone could under the circumstances. Ricardo Montalban is in a similar position, playing Esteban, the military power behind the corrupt alcalde's rule, but in some ways he's better off, since his normal acting-style was more florid than that of his predecessor, and thus his Esteban doesn't seem too derivative. The rest of the cast deliver decent perfs, from Gilbert Roland and Yvonne deCarlo as Diego's dad and mom, to Robert Middleton and Louise Sorel as the alcalde and his perhaps unfaithful wife. Anne Archer gets one good scene as the romantic interest Teresa-- the one taking place in the church, where Zorro's pretending to be a priest-- but her character doesn't get nearly as much attention as the Linda Darnell version did. She doesn't even get a final clinch with the hero at the conclusion. Her casting in terms of her age is a bit odd too. In the 1940 film, Gale Sondergaard, then a little over forty, played the aunt of Teresa, and that role was played by Linda Darnell, who was then seventeen. In contrast, Anne Archer was only seven years younger than Louise Sorel. There's an odd remark by Middleton's character about how some figure akin to Zorro may have been observed in "The Pyrenees" of Spain, which was perhaps meant to address where Diego got the idea of Zorro. Possibly this remark was in the 1940 film too, but I'm not inspired to find out.

ZORRO IN THE COURT OF SPAIN (1962)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*, 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*                                                                                                                          ZORRO IN THE COURT OF SPAIN starts rather slowly but soon shapes up into a decent little swashbuckler. Most of the movie's alternate titles seem to emphasize the titular masked hero swashing his buckles in Spain, so I've no idea why the English dub I saw claims that the action all takes place in "Lusitania," which in recent centuries usually connoted Portugal. All the names involved in the court-intrigue are almost certainly fictional, so the change wasn't made to offset political connotations.                                                       

As with some of the other "Euro-Zorros" around this time, being set in Europe raises the stakes from the more modest adventures of the California-based Fox. A new grand duke, brother of the previous and deceased duke, has challenged the widowed duchess for the throne of Lusitania. The duchess has gone into hiding with her allies, but for some reason she's separated from her small daughter, and one of those allies takes the little girl to Lusitania Capital (I'll call it) to hide her from the enemy in a monastery/orphanage. The Duke either lives in the Capital or close to it, doing various tyrannical things with the help of his main henchman Captain Miguel (Alberto Lupo), so this choice of locations doesn't seem like the swiftest idea. In due time the Duke and Miguel will get their hands on the kid in order to force the duchess to abdicate. In addition, evil Miguel has been pestering Marquise di Villa Verde to let him marry beauteous Bianca (Nadia Marlowa), despite the fact that Bianca is betrothed to marry the Marquise's son Riccardo (George Ardisson), also Bianca's cousin. Riccardo comes to the Capital just in time for all these events, having been to Mexico for training as a young cavalier (one of two major flippings of the usual Zorro-script).                                                 

     
Apparently, Riccardo and his factotum Paquito got some advance intel on the troubles in Lusitania, because as soon as he arrives, he's already got the whole Zorro idea thought out. He immediately plays the part of the jaded aristocrat with no interest in local politics, so as to allay any suspicions from Captain Miguel and his sister Isabella, who oddly is currently married to the Marquise. The father of Riccardo and Isabella have no interpersonal relations, though, so this may be a change made by a translator. Some Zorro-stories give the main heroine an interfering aunt, which may be where Isabella comes from, but she only has one scene relevant to the narrative and totally disappears from the latter part of the movie. Anyway, Riccardo's louche act alienates both his father and Bianca, but it works to allow the hero to listen in on the plots of his enemies and work to counter them as-- Zorro!                                                           

   
   The fight-scenes are passable and Ardisson makes an okay masked avenger, even though he gets more mileage out of the Riccardo role. But the most interesting change is that although the heroine goes through the usual process of rejecting Riccardo while going gaga over his costumed identity, this time Zorro marries the heroine in his non-costumed identity.    No rationale is presented, though possibly Riccardo does this to block Miguel from forcing Bianca to marry him. Riccardo, knowing that Bianca doesn't love his false identity, refrains from making her share his marriage-bed. But of course, once he rescues the little girl from the evildoers and gives the duchess the chance to oust the evil Duke, Zorro can unmask and the two enjoy connubial bliss. The villains are not very stylish this time, but the romance is much better developed than in the majority of B-Zorros. 

THE DEVILS OF TERROR (1959)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                              I've heard that some of the "Mexican westerns" of the 1950s had metaphenomenal elements, probably mostly of the uncanny kind, where evildoers dress up like ghosts. A lot of American B-westerns played around with similar elements, but few of them were very noteworthy. DEVILS OF TERROR feels like a close emulation of those old B's, but this time, the titular "devils" are just a bunch of criminals riding around in devil-costumes for purposes of terrorizing a small town's populace. I'm not sure what they get out of it except in one case: they kill off a local landholder to get his ranch. But the man's pretty daughter comes to town to claim her inheritance, so she becomes the riders' new target. Fortunately, a two-fisted government agent named Gaston (Gaston Santos) comes to town and sorts the evildoers out after about an hour of messing around. This was about as routine an oater as one could hope to find. About the only thing was that unlike most horror-thrillers of the period, this was in very brilliant color. Why the studio did so for such an ordinary product puzzles me. But from what I can tell, the lead actor made a couple of other horror-westerns in color around that time-- THE LIVING COFFIN, THE SWAMP OF THE MONSTERS-- so maybe the studio involved thought Santos was going to justify the extra expense.                                                                                                              

THE OUTLAW (1943)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                              This naturalistic film, arguably the first in the subgenre of "sex-westerns," just barely qualifies for one of my ten tropes-- that of "bizarre crimes"-- and even then, the crime only takes up about three or four minutes of screen time and is more psychological than physical in nature.                                                                                                   

I'd seen THE OUTLAW a couple of times before my recent rescreening. For several years, I've known a lot of little factoids about the movie. That it was filmed in 1941 but blocked by the Hays Code until 1943. That the cast consists of just four main characters and a tiny number of support-roles. That OUTLAW was the debut film for two of the actors, Jack Buetel and Jane Russell, both under exclusive contract to producer Howard Hughes for the next seven years. I've learned other bits and pieces since my re-watch, but as of this writing I don't know exactly how the project came about, or why it was important enough to Howard Hughes to assume directorial duties on OUTLAW, even though he'd only directed one other film thirteen years ago. But given the fact that Hughes had acquired partial ownership of the studio RKO by 1941, I think his main aim was to win fame with a big, money-making picture with lots of sex appeal, and that he probably outlined his list of story-preferences to screenwriter Jules Furthman and let Furthman figure out how to stitch everything together.                         

The result was an overbaked melodrama that a number of modern viewers have called "campy" or "so bad it's good," though these assessments don't quite capture the nature of OUTLAW. For one thing, Furthman finds some inventive ways to bring together the four essential characters: Billy the Kid (Buetel), Rio McDonald (Russell), famed gunslinger Doc Holiday (Walter Huston), and Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell), sheriff to the New Mexico town of Lincoln. All of the film's action takes place either in Lincoln or in the wilderness surrounding it. Garrett and Rio have both lived in town for an unspecified amount of time, while Billy and Holiday converge on the town for separate but related reasons. However, Holiday has been in Lincoln before. At the film's opening he's on foot and chasing down a man who stole his horse, so he comes to Lincoln because unnamed witnesses told him they saw the horse and its rider heading for the town. But Holiday explicitly mentions that he hopes to encounter his old pal there in Lincoln. Holiday is surprised to learn that Garrett has recently become a lawman, and there's a strong suggestion that the two of them may once have been involved in extra-legal activities. Holiday also knows that Rio and her aunt "recently" moved to Lincoln, suggesting that he knew the younger woman-- whom he calls "his girl"-- in her previous residence in Socorro (probably meant to be identical with the town of that name in New Mexico). Given Holiday's greater age, it's not impossible that he set up Rio, apparently more a "mistress" than a girlfriend, on her Lincoln chicken-ranch, though there's no way to prove this speculation.               

Holiday finds his horse in the possession of Billy, who claims he bought the roan from a stranger. Holiday seems not the least bit interested in Billy's excuse, and Garrett prepares to arrest the alleged horse thief before Holiday can gun Billy down. But Holiday is amused by Billy's nerviness, and when the young man decks Garrett in mid-arrest, this also amuses the older gunfighter. But Garrett is enraged at having been one-upped in front of his old comrade, and he orders both men to leave town by sundown.                                                                                                                                                  Before either can do so, that night Billy is attacked in the barn where he stables his horse by a gun-wielding would-be killer. He wrestles down the assailant and finds that it's the lovely Rio. He's never met her, but when she gives her last name and the name of the town she formerly occupied, he realizes that she's the sister of a man Billy killed in self-defense, when the two men quarreled over a woman. While holding Rio down Billy comments on her comeliness. Rio responds by faking Billy out and trying to stab him with a pitchfork. Again Billy restrains her, and they roll in the hay some more, concluding with what might be a scene of Billy raping the nubile Rio in deep shadows-- though clearly Hughes wanted to keep things ambiguous.     

The next day Holiday and Billy have not left town, and an ambitious would-be deputy challenges Billy and gets gunned down. When Garrett seeks to arrest Billy, Holiday sides with the youth, increasing Garrett's sense of betrayal. Billy gets wounded, so Holiday tries to hide him at Rio's ranch, and then leaves to decoy pursuers away from Billy. Rio cooperates but never makes the slightest reference to Billy having ravished her-- again, Hughes playing it as safe as he could in the Hays era. For the month that Billy in in Rio's care, Rio falls in love with Billy, and even her aunt confesses his charms. Billy, who has expressed sentiments about the treachery of women, doesn't reciprocate. Indeed, both Holiday and Billy insult the young woman by implying that their quarrel over the roan takes priority over their rivalry for Rio.                                                                     

Most of the rest of the film's events take place in the wilderness, as Garrett relentlessly pursues the two fugitives. Though Rio stays behind at the ranch, she ensures her future participation by peevishly filling the canteens of both men with sand. Later a vengeful Billy returns to the ranch and utters threats that sound like those of ravishment. But what he actually does is to drag Rio out into the desert and tie her up, so she can suffer the rays of the sun as Billy and Doc did. Garrett and his captive Holiday find Rio, and Garrett, anticipating that Billy will change his mind and return to free the girl, sets a trap. Billy is captured. Yet if he thought Rio's ordeal would "tame" her, he's proved wrong by an incident in which she nearly drowns Billy.                                                                                         

 I won't specify the exact way that the conflicts between Billy, Holiday and Garrett shake out at the climax, except that Rio's role in the story becomes an indirect one. In later years, the three-way male conflict led to many critics divining a homoerotic vibe between the trio. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility, but I would have to see evidence that either Hughes (at least in his capacity as producer) or Furthman had a habit of working such material into a lot of other, ostensibly mainstream movies. However, one of Holiday's last speeches about the precarious friendships between males-- particularly two powerful males-- could have been just as easily written for any number of less risible westerns. Even Garrett's animosity, hating Billy for his having made the sheriff look bad in front of an esteemed friend, could have appeared in a lot of the mainstream movies Furthman had been writing since the 1910s. Also common to a lot of westerns was the idea that sooner or later the roving gunfighter needs to settle down and make babies with a likely spouse. There's more than a little of the "war between men and women" going on throughout the picture, but the conflict between Billy and Rio is resolved as it is in almost every other Hollywood romance-- whereas only death, not sex, resolves the conflict between the three men. There are some campy-sounding lines in OUTLAW, particularly all the odd remarks about how much Billy and Holiday love their little horse. But despite the excessive nature of Jane Russell's feminine assets-- which were more responsible for selling the movie than any of the conflicts of the males-- I tend to think that excess serves the cause of heterosexuality.                                 

THE SIGN OF THE COYOTE (1963)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Even without knowing much about the history of California's annexation by the United States, I knew that such a transition of power was not going to be as hunky-dory as depicted in 2005's LEGEND OF ZORRO. For that reason, I immediately liked that SIGN was set in 1847 and that it showed that there was quite a bit of conflict between the new regime of the Americans, dominantly of English extraction, and of the native Californians, dominantly of Spanish descent.

SIGN, a Spanish-Italian co-production, is also interesting in providing info on how Europeans related to the public domain character of Zorro. Jose Mallorqui, a Spanish writer, invented "El Coyote," a patent Zorro imitation, in 1943, and produced almost 200 works in this series. Two Mexican-Spanish movies adapted the character in 1954, three years before Walt Disney initiated its ZORRO series, and SIGN was one of two sixties films adapting the Mallorqui character again, albeit with totally different casts and directors. 

For the first thirty minutes, director/co-writer Mario (EYE IN THE LABYRINTH) Caiano creates considerable empathy for the fate of the Californians under the rule of Governor Parker, who's just the norteamericano version of every Spanish tyrant Zorro ever faced. A particular standout is a courtroom scene, in which an American gunfighter is let off the hook for killing an innocent woman while trying to shoot a Californian.

On the minus side, the hero is introduced with very little fanfare, as if he's already been around for a while. He's Cesar (Fernando Casanova), whose name just happens to be that of Zorro's offspring in the movie DON Q, SON OF ZORRO, and his elderly father's name, at least in the translated version I watched, is Diego. However, the father of this Cesar has never been a masked vigilante and plays little part in the narrative. Cesar doesn't exactly duplicate the fey qualities of the original Diego, but he refuses to take direct action in the face of tyranny, which is enough to arouse the contempt of his leading lady Leonora. Naturally, he uses the alter ego of El Coyote-- essentially a charro outfit with a domino mask-- to battle the evil Americans. Usually El Coyote works alone, but he's able to call upon a small collection of Californians who don masks to help him. There's one odd moment when the hero is aided by one of his family's female servants in a version of his masked attire, but her masquerade is not explained.

So in the end SIGN soon settles into just another Zorro-type flick, with the usual swordfights and romantic interludes between the cute noblewoman and the masked swashbuckler. Most disappointingly, the menace of the crude Americans is largely brushed off once Parker is killed. Aside from Caiano, the only other Italian name I spotted in the credits was that of Piero Lulli, a veteran of several peplum adventures.

ZORRO (1975)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

The Walt Disney ZORRO teleseries sparked a fair number of copycat Zorro-productions in Europe throughout the decade of the 1960s and for the first half of the seventies. Of those I've seen, the 1975 ZORRO is the best, though oddly it diverges not only from Disney but from the original 1919 Johnston McCulley text.

In the first Zorro story, Diego is a Spanish noble whose father has a governmental position in Nueva Aragon, a colony in Spanish California in the early 1800s. Having heard from his father of the rampant corruption in the region by the military, Diego goes to the States to help-- but with an advance plan to pose as a fop while working against the military in a colorful disguise. Diego's motives, when stated at all, involve "noblesse oblige," the obligation of the ruling class to dispense justice to their subjects. In the course of stamping out evil, Diego meets a comely young lass, Lolita Pulido, who has contempt for Diego's mincing persona but falls in love with his swashbuckling identity. 

Unlike the book, ZORRO starts at the beginning, but gives Diego a rather proletarian makeover not unlike the one seen in THE MASK OF ZORRO. Diego (Alain Delon), who knows swordsmanship but whose familial connections are not mentioned, is first seen visiting in Spain, paying a visit to his close friend Miguel de la Serna. In common to Diego, whose clothes are those of a working man, Miguel is richly dressed, and has a fine house, a wife and a young son. Miguel announces that he plans to succeed his late father as governor of Nueva Aragon, after the latter perished of malaria. Worldly-wise Diego informs Miguel that there's no malaria in Spanish California, and cautions Miguel to be wary. However, that very night assassins strike, taking Miguel's life before Diego can kill them. 

Thus, whatever Diego's life was before, he devotes his existence to vengeance for his idealistic friend. He goes to California, posing as Miguel, and assumes the role of governor, though he plays the part with a foppish air. The head of the corrupt military, Colonel Huerta (Stanley Baker), is disappointed that his assassins failed and can find no way to prevent the newcomer from taking charge. 

Diego doesn't have the idea of a double identity in mind until a young boy tells him about some local legend of a crusading bandit whose name is Spanish for "fox." In the mansion of the late governor (i.e., Miguel's father), Diego meets Joaquin, a deaf-mute who served the governor, and the governor's widow, who never encountered Miguel earlier and has zero interest in her supposed nephew. (The aunt plays a minor comic role but is not important to the story.) Diego even gets help from the late governor's dog, Assassin by name, who shows Diego and pseudo-Bernardo the entrance to a secret chamber. Possibly this discovery helps the two decide to become allies in the Zorro project, though the movie never shows this resolution.

Though Diego spends a little time masquerading as a common laborer to suss things out, soon he dons cape and mask and begins his career of battling the tyrannical soldiers. He also meets his romantic interest, Hortensia Pulido (Ottavio Piccolo). She is also becomes a little more proletarian than her book-model, for evil Huerta caused Hortensia's family to be dispossessed of their riches. Huerta also puts the moves on Hortensia, but Zorro's on hand to thwart him there as well. Oh, and in the only real shout-out to the Disney series, one of Huerta's men is heavyset Sergeant Garcia (comedian Moustache), whom Zorro also humiliates.

Huerta sets a trap for the Fox. using Hortesia as bait, but Zorro easily rescues the lissome lady and eludes capture. However, in a subsequent chase, Zorro appears to perish. Huerta celebrates by setting up a wedding for himself and Hortensia. But Zorro re-appears, sparking the downtrodden people to rebel and overcome the soldiers. (One noblewoman even gets into the act, judo chopping a soldier into unconsciousness.) Then there follows a protracted swordfight between Zorro and Huerta, which by its length may have been seeking to equal the run-time of the eight-minute duel in the 1952 SCARAMOUCHE. (To be sure, Huerta loses his sword for a bit and makes up by using both a spear and an axe in its stead, though the antagonists finish up with the traditional rapiers.) I think ZORRO's battle is two minutes longer, but I suppose it depends what scene you start with.

Delon throws a lot of charisma into the heroic role and has a little fun with the fop persona, though the script doesn't do much with that aspect. Baker, in his last role, makes a good villain, and the stuntwork is generally good. Though Zorro rides a horse, there's no nod toward giving the steed a name, as in the Disney show. In fact, the dog Assassin gets more screen time. The movie's only fault is a really corny theme song, which unfortunately is played both at the beginning and end of the film. From a quick Wiki-check it looks like this and a couple of other flicks were the last European Zorros of the decade-- and a few years later, the big franchises to imitate became STAR WARS and MAD MAX, effectively ending Europe's original love affair with the foxy bandit.

LUCKY LUKE (1991)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

The only consistent marvelous element of this live-action adaptation of the venerable Belgian comics-feature is that the hero's horse talks (with no lip-movements) to him, and Lucky Luke talks back. I think maybe one or two other characters hear the horse talk, as well. There are one or two examples of "fallacious figments" that have little to no impact on the story, like Luke being able to outdraw his own shadow. There are a couple of scenes that hint that the hero has some unusual property of good luck, but these are rather nugatory as well.

As I said above, LUCKY LUKE the franchise, first published in Belgium, proved extremely popular with European audiences with its antic take on the exploits of a laid-back gunfighter in the American West. The original hero, however, was IMO something of a goofy take on the visual persona of Gary Cooper, This resulted in the image below:

Now, by the time actor Terence Hill essayed his version of Luke, he had become internationally famous for his character of Trinity, a western rogue featured in assorted knockabout comedies. Hill almost certainly used his star-power to secure the job of directing the 1991 LUKE, given that he had only directed one earlier movie in 1984. He's probably the one who decided to eschew the usual look of the comics-character for a dominantly white outfit. Did the color symbolize the hero's purity of heart? The world may never know.

LUKE adapts "Daisy Town," one of the albums produced by the character's creator. I have not read that story, but I' m reasonably well acquainted with the parameters of the series, including the fact that the aforesaid town is the gunfighter's main base of operations.The first time Movie-Luke visits Daisy Town, it's clear he's been there before from the familiar way he greets the lovely saloon-singer Lotta Legs (Nancy Morgan). However, when rowdies make trouble for Lotta, Luke easily defeats them with his mad gunfighting skills. She then talks Luke into becoming the town's sheriff.

The script then puts forth an idea that had strong sociological possibilities, for Luke does his job so well that Daisy Town gets very dull. Lotta, laid off from her saloon job because no one's patronizing the establishment, asks Luke if he might let up on enforcing the law quite so efficiently. Pure-of-heart Luke rejects that possibility, though he doesn't seem offended, or even moved in any respect, given that Hill's Luke never shows any expression but absolute coolness.

To interrupt this tedium, Luke's most persistent foes, the Dalton Brothers (no relation to the historical figures), arrive in Daisy Town, having been released due to jail overcrowding. Knowing from their past defeats that Luke can master them all, the outlaws scheme to inflame the neighboring Ute Indians against the town. This includes selling the braves on a vision of the banality of the 20th-century world, with traffic jams and a nuclear explosion. However, after all of this setup, the war between cowboys and Indians dwindles down to a big nothing. The movie terminates in a duel wherein Luke easily bests the nasty Brothers and puts them back in the calaboose, at which point he rides off into the sunset-- perhaps ensuring that Daisy Town will return to a state of relative lawlessness.

Though LUKE was initiated by an Italian production company, the movie was shot in the States and most of the major players, aside from Hill, are Americans, like Morgan, Ron Carey and singer Roger Miller (voicing the talking horse). Possibly one of the other adaptations of the franchise might capture the original's appeal better, for this incarnation, ostensibly a pilot for a LUKE TV show starring Hill, is so laid-back that it made me want to lay down and go to sleep.

SEVEN NUNS IN KANSAS CITY (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Getting the phenomenality matters attended to first: in the opening scenes two prospectors are riding on their mules, and the mules talk to each other. I think the miners understand them, but the sequence is so short I rate it just a minor deviation from consensual reality.

As for the rest of this comedy-western-- right in the tradition of the knockabout slapstick flicks that the Italians prize so much-- the real puzzle is not, why is it bad, but why isn't it bad in the usual way?

Knockabout comedies only require a loose, often goofy premise that provides ample opportunities for various heroes and villains to get into big honking fights. A toss-off flick like THE STORY OF KARATE, FISTS AND BEANS may be formally bad, but it was bad in the way its audience wanted it to be bad, and so that's an accomplishment of sorts.

NUNS has the simple premise. After one of the old sourdoughs gets killed in what is supposed to a funny manner, the other discovers gold and makes a map of the location. Somehow two separate outlaw gangs start looking for the map. I forget how the crooks get the idea that two roving cowboys-- coded gay, because they wear pastel-colored shirts-- possess the desired item. The rhinestone cowboys go on the run. All of this setup is standard for this type of film.

Up to the first big slapstick set-piece, the film has been slow, but not without incident. The gay guys seek sanctuary in a Catholic convent, inhabited by something like a dozen nuns. One outlaw gang follows their quarry into the convent, and a fight erupts between the outlaws and the nuns. Apart from the usual comedy antics, like hitting the outlaws with clubs and fruits, the nuns are fairly beefy women and use their fists pretty well. The fight lasts about six minutes, which might some sort of record for female-male fights, at least in Italian cinema. 

And then the gay guys run off, the outlaws chase them, and seven of the nuns give pursuit-- and nothing happens.

Or rather, most of the same things happen, lots of shots of people riding around, one or two scenes of people shooting at each other, and no more slapstick combat. That's what I mean about the film not being bad in a way its prospective audience would have wanted, because it looks like a knockabout comedy, but it barely is one. Oh, and the two swish-kabobs end up dressing like women and joining a dance-hall to escape their pursuers, The End.

Calling them "swish-kabobs" is specifically directed to the types the actors portray, for the two cowboys are swish-types all the way, possessed of no other characteristics. Yet, while one might expect a 1973 comedy to toss out a lot of demeaning jokes, NUNS really does not do that, any more than it makes the two guys-- the default stars of the show-- admirable in any way either. It's the most neutral depiction of gay characters I've ever seen.

Though production values look reasonably high, I knew none of the actors. I theorize, for what little it matters, that director Marcello Zeani-- who has only one other credit on IMDB-- was just handed a certain amount of money with which to take a crew to the Italian countryside and shoot enough footage to make a quickie release. And if it weren't for the ambivalent blessings of streaming TV, this mostly dull farrago would never have crossed my path.

HIS NAME WAS HOLY GHOST (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

In all likelihood HOLY GHOST (in Italian, the name of the featured character is "Spirito Santo") came about when star Gianni Garko got together with director Giuliano Camimeo in an attempt to duplicate the box-office success of the Sartana films. Garko had appeared as that gunfighter in all but the last of that five-film series, while Camimeo had directed all but the first one. At the very least, the attire of GHOST's hero-- I'll call him "Spirito" to avoid over-using the English term-- was a conscious distancing from the black-clad Sartana by having Spirito dress in dominantly white clothes. To be sure, there's a comedic moment where a character who appears to know Spirito from a previous acquaintance uses the name "Harold" for the hero. But since Spirito is a trickster, this could be as illusory as anything else about the protagonist.

Without delving too deeply into the complicated history of the Christian term "Holy Ghost," I would say its strongest connotation is that it is a holy power mediating between God in Heaven and the mortal body of Christ, and its separateness from Jesus is demonstrated in the dove that descends to Christ at his baptism. Camimeo of course was making a violent spaghetti western, not a meditation on Christian cosmology. But he and his scripters include a lot of religious allusions into GHOST, and one of the most notable is that much of the time Spirito walks around with a dove on his shoulder. (In a comic aside, he calls it a pigeon.)

Like Sartana, Spirito seems to be primarily a gambler, and he comes to the Mexican town Morelos because he won a gold mine off a poker-cheat whom Spirito had to kill-- *maybe* in self-defense. Yet when he makes his entry into Morelos, Camimeo exploits the impression that Spirito is a savior-figure. A detachment of cruel soldiers, working for the revolutionary General Ubarte, abuses the citizens of Morelos, and it just so happens that the twelve officers are seen seated a table in a clear parody of Da Vinci's "Last Supper." Spirito enters, claiming that the soldiers ought to be washing the peasants' feet, and blasts all the bad officers to hell.

He does so, however, with motives of greed, because he thinks the old rulers of Morelos can help him locate his new gold mine. He's told that Ubarte's authority is too strong to challenge. Spirito journeys to another city, where Ubarte administers his rule, and asks for permission to mine for gold. Ubarte informs the gringo stranger that the rumor of gold is just a "dream to make the nightmare of life easier" and denies his petition. Soon Ubarte learns that Spirito killed several of his men and sends an execution squad. Spirito uses a unique gimmick-- a series of mirrors sewn in the inner lining of his coat-- to blind the gunmen and then kill them.

A passionate young woman, Juana (Pilar Velasquez), sees Spirito as the leader of a revolution, though he shows no interest in such political affairs. He does ally himself with Juana's people with the goal of getting rid of Ubarte, and to that end he enlists the help of an old colleague, the burly Chicken (Chris Huerta). He still appears to be seeking information on the location of the mine, but by the latter part of the film it's evident Spirito is really focused on "mining" a store of gold in the hands of the corrupt Ubarte.

The Christian allusions become much less evident in the middle part of the film, but they ramp up in the last third when Spirito unveils his "Trojan horse" for penetrating Ubarte's defenses. Granted, the hero's summoning of a passel of prostitutes doesn't accord with Jesus's attempt to redeem harlots from their sinful ways. But the script for GHOST is nevertheless having fun by juxtaposing the high rhetoric of religion with all sorts of earthly pleasures. 

There is a lot of comedy in the film, including one impossible stratagem-- Chicken creates explosive eggs by feeding real hens dynamite-- but I'd still term GHOST a light-hearted adventure, because it's more about the invigoration of spectacular combat than humorous setups. The end scene depends in part upon the "Trojan prostitutes" smuggling in male rebels dressed as women. Yet the females clobber more soldier-boys than do the men, including Spirito. This more or less makes up for the fact that Juana, despite her fiery temper, is just another damsel in distress. Ubarte-- whose best line has him gloating that the peasants will never revolt without intellectuals to lead them-- is slain by Spirito. There's a last minute confrontation with some lesser villains who try ripping off Spirito's filthy lucre, which allows him one last "holy" trick. Like most spaghetti heroes, Spirito's main goal is monetary, to be the guy who gets the gold in the end. But indirectly, his selfishness redeems a whole city and puts at least some gold back into the building of a church. So, in what may be rare occurrence in Euro-westerns, good works are accomplished by the acts of a sinner.

THE THREE SWORDS OF ZORRO (1963)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

This "Paella western," filmed mostly in Spain but purporting to take place in 1830s Mexico, has been seen under the dull title  "Sword of Zorro." But a number of 1963 lobby cards play up the image of three sword-wielding cavaliers, one of them female, and this is certainly the most noteworthy aspect of this obscure movie-- even though the viewer doesn't see the trio until the film's end.

That gimmick aside, SWORDS is a better take on the Zorro mythos than director Ricardo Blasco's second and last take on the myth, 1965's BEHIND THE MASK OF ZORRO. The 1998 MASK OF ZORRO labored to make its "Zorro 2.0" into a citizen of Mexico rather than of Spain, but SWORDS got there first. Young Diego is not a noble cavalier, but a Mexican child whose parents are killed by a local tyrant. Diego is then raised by another Mexican family, alongside that family's blood daughter Maria (Mikaela Wood). When Diego is about six or so, he witnesses a cadre of the tyrant's guards chase a fugitive into his adopted family's house. Is the older man some previous Zorro? He's never called that, but while fighting with the tyrant's soldiers, the man carves a "Z" in the forehead of one opponent. The soldiers accidentally kill Diego's adoptive mother, which incites in the young boy a desire to fight evil.

In his manhood Diego (Guy Stockwell) assumes the identity of the black-masked Zorro and begins preying upon the nasty aristocrats, terrorizing the bumbling soldiers with his heroic mastery of sword and whip. For good measure, a young female named Virginia (Gloria Milland) travels to Zorro's city to marry the governor, who's expressly said to be old enough to be her father. Virginia is charmed by both Diego and Zorro but the script doesn't bother doing much with the old "girl hates the hero's phony coward-persona."

SWORD is pretty much Stockwell's film all the way, since no other performers get any standout moments. But Stockwell is good for all that he never again played a role similar to this one. Stuntwork and dialogue are decent. The end-gimmick, in which Real Zorro is joined by two Assistant Zorros, smacks of the original novel, in which the hero had a small band of revolutionaries in his service. Here, the Extra Two Zorros are introduced so suddenly that I didn't even follow who the Second Male Zorro was. The very last shot lingers on the face of Female Zorro Maria, who seems to be a little sad that her non-brother Diego has won the heart of Virginia. Given Diego's adoptive status I wondered if this Zorro might have a fling with a non-blood sibling, but that final shot is the only scene that suggests any of the filmmakers considered the notion.

COMIN' AT YA! (1981), TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS (1983)

 

PHENOMENALITY: (1) naturalistic, (2) *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I've devoted space to a number of limited talents who made one or two notable films and then either left the industry or become hired guns for TV. But there are also a number of people who really had no discernible talent except to take advantage of trends.

In the sixties American actor/producer Tony Anthony parlayed the enthusiasm for spaghetti westerns into a short career as a star of Italian horse operas, four featuring a character called "the Stranger" (largely a Clint Eastwood clone) while the fifth was the above average BLINDMAN. The craze for the subgenre had bottomed out in the mid seventies, and Anthony went into other endeavors. However, in the late seventies he made contact with two other businessmen. Between the three of them they not only brought a single spaghetti oater into prominence (with Anthony as the lead), they also launched a new iteration of the fifties' "3-D craze" with their western COMIN' AT YA. The film's success led to American studios launching 3-D versions of properties such as JAWS and THE AMITYVILLE HORROR. However, the eighties 3-D craze lasted no longer than the one in the 1950s, for when Anthony and his partners tried to duplicate their success in 1983 with TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS (also starring Anthony), they crashed and burned. Anthony retired from filmmaking, though one of his collaborators, Gene Quintano, had fluctuating success as a Hollywood writer and/or director for the next ten or so years.

The success of the 1981 film isn't hard to understand. While it's just another formula western-- albeit one more sentimental than the more famous Italian works-- director Ferdinando (BLINDMAN) Baldi and composer Ennio Morricone revived many of the sensory and narrative tropes they'd used throughout the first wave of the spaghettis. It's a very simple story of white slavers abducting the bride (Victoria Abril) of gunfighter Hart (Anthony), followed by Hart's involved efforts to rescue his wife and to revenge himself upon the outlaw gang. There's no metaphenomenal content and it might be a stretch for me to categorize Hart's mission as an example of naturalistic "bizarre crimefighting--" though Hart does blow up a whole town before executing his main enemy by blowing up the windmill to which the villain is bound. Ironically, the flick's greatest asset was that it only used the 3-D effects sparingly.

I don't know what went on afterward, but I will theorize that Anthony and his partners instantly decided that their new motto would be "nothing succeeds like excess." One quote claims that Quintano wanted to follow up the success of COMIN' AT YA with a heist film like TOPKAPI. But clearly the story put together by Anthony and Quintano (albeit turned into a screenplay by three other guys) is much more indebted to a much bigger 1981 success: Steven Spielberg's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. That said, TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS does often seem like a hideous amalgam of RAIDERS with a very bad heist-film-- and the strange result may be the only imitation of Indiana Jones that didn't have a combative hero anywhere near it. Even the return of Baldi as director and Morricone as composer couldn't stem the chaos that ensued.

Anthony didn't look very dynamic when he was shooting owlhoots in COMIN' AT YA, but in CROWNS he looks pasty and bloated when he's seen, all on his own, negotiating various traps in a cave, trying to obtain an artifact for his employers. For the film's first ten minutes phlegmatic protagonist "J.T. Striker" is assailed by animals, automatic traps and what seem to be discarnate spirits, with no rhyme or reason. He escapes the cave, returns to civilization (somehow) and delivers the desired artifact to his employers. After minor resistance, the employers talk Striker into assembling a heist-team that can break into the compound of a malevolent cult-leader. For scientific reasons, Striker's benefactors want this "tomb raider" to steal a treasure from the compound which will make it possible to summon forth the power of "the Four Crowns" (even though one crown was lost in antiquity, so there's really only three).

The film spends about half an hour having Striker recruit a bunch of maladjusted ne'er-do-wells who will constitute his ideal heist-team. These half-baked characters aren't worth describing, except to say that they demonstrate that none of the writers knew how to execute even limited characterizations. Even trapeze artist Liz (Ana Obregon) sparks no interest. Striker eventually talks even the most reluctant allies into joining his team, though he does so in part by whipping out the cave-artifact and showing his partners how it can call forth poltergeist-related effects. It never occurs to Striker that this might have fatal consequences, because the script says, "Shoehorn in as many ridiculous 3-D effects as possible, no matter how you do it."

Then the remainder of the film is devoted to the team's glacial progress as they break into the cult-compound. To sum up, traps of some sort kill all of the heist-artists except Striker and Liz (the better to make sure they're able to hook up in the end). Then things look grim for the survivors when the cultists catch them and start to spray them with machine gun fire. However, Striker has just obtained two mystic gems from whatever crowns are in the sanctum. The gems give Striker the power to enact a ghastly reprise of the Nazi-Killing Scene from RAIDERS, wiping out the cultists with patently phony FX and lots of objects-flying-on-wires. Once all the villains are dead, Striker is able to throw off the influence of the possessing power, whatever it was, and to destroy the gems so that no one can use them again. Roll credits.

While no RAIDERS-imitator was ever able to touch the hem of Spielberg's directorial jacket, Anthony and Quintano may be the only ones to botch the basic idea of the daredevil-adventurer. Neither Striker nor any of his aides get into exciting fights or execute thrilling escapes,. So it appears that the guys who forged the main story thought that all RAIDERS had going for it was a big boulder at the start and a bunch of evildoers getting blasted to smithereens at the conclusion. But though CROWNS flopped at the 1983 box office, I have the impression that people looking for the next "so bad it's good" film probably will get more of a boost from CROWNS than from COMIN' AT YA.

Though Anthony retired after CROWNS, Quintano was able to parley the success of COMIN' AT YA into a career. Oddly, a year or so after the awfulness of CROWNS, he co-wrote two more Indiana-clones for Cannon Films, the back-to-back films KING SOLOMON'S MINES and ALLEN QUATERMAIN AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD. Mediocre as these movies were, they look like models of well-executed formula fiction next to CROWNS, so I think the rapid improvement must lie with Quintano's co-writers, even though they didn't have stellar careers either.