Un dólar y una tumba

John Ireland heads an excellent cast which is aided by a very good script. Ireland is the "badlands drifter" who inadvertently stumbles into a complex web of twisted family dynamics.

Even at the end of the film it is not entirely clear why the Mexican patriarch played by spaghetti western veteran ROBERTO CAMARDIEL resents his son CHRIS (ROBERT WOODS) so much that he sets him on a path that must surely lead to tragedy.

CAMARDIEL's behaviour towards his only daughter Barbara (DANIELA GIORDANO) is much more understandable: she stood up to him, and attempted to run away with her lover. It is this situation that IRELAND's character stumbles into, setting off a chain of events that finally lead him to take action, but show him to be horribly emotionally crippled by his past life.

Tom Weisser incorrectly describes the film as "Basically, it's the story of a drifter who gets caught up in a range war between two powerful ranchers".

True, there are two powerful ranchers but the younger joins forces with CHRIS, to advance his own romantic interest in his sister Barbara.

Weisser also writes off director LEON KLIMOVKSY "static type of "zoom and pan" film-making," but I found nothing distracting or annoying in either the film's direction or camera work. The score for this 1969 film is by another veteran of the genre FRANCESCO DE MASI.

On the Spaghetti Western Scales of Justice I would rate this 7.5/10. This is just one of a handful of westerns where the actions of an overbearing Mexican rancher/landowner are pivotal to the story, eg. A BULLET FOR SANDOVAL comes immediately to mind.