O Bastardo

Like so many of the Hollywood female legends of bygone days Rita Hayworth was having trouble finding work. But it was more than changing taste and newer and younger stars coming along. Hayworth was showing signs of the dementia that sadly plagued her last exile years from the silver screen.

The Bastard was one of many bad films she made toward the end of her career. She plays the mother of a pair of criminal sons Giuliano Gemma and Klaus Kinski. One's just bad, but Kinski is plain psychotic. Kinski thinks Gemma betrayed him, Kinski has him worked over and then rapes and runs off with Gemma's girlfriend.

All this while poor drunken Rita weeps and just says she wants one big happy family again.

We learn here that Joan Crawford turned this one down. Smart career move.

I am not a great spaghetti crime flicks fan. Not at all. But this one is worth in some points. I think it's an acceptable time waster, where we can watch one more time the lost Rita Hayworth, already "dead" as an actress, a real one, I mean. Don't forget that she had the terrific Alzheimer disease - lost of memory - and that she forgot almost all her script lines. The sequence where she talks to Giuliano Gemma in the drawing room, and holds a bottle of whisky, as she wanted to read the bottle label...I guess she actually read her script lines. She had the very same problem on the set of other films, such as WRATH OF GOLD. When I knew that, I must admit that I was devastated. So sad. It really made me sick.

So, back to this feature, I spent a good time watching it. A robbery right in the middle of the movie, a sequence with no real connection with the rest of the story, a scheme I have seen in some other films.

But the real mystery, is why the hell an earthquake has to do in such a movie?

As if we saw John Mac Lane in a DIE HARD flick dying in falling from a chair...

Yes a strange movie indeed.

This is a pretty obscure and hard to get movie, that stars an interesting cast and is in the end really well worth watching.

It's not a particularly well made movie. It obviously really suffers from its low budget. It's an European co-production, that's still entirely English spoken but it remains one with a European and particular an Italian style to it. No wonder, since the director Duccio Tessari is an Italian. It has a cheap look and feel to it but it still adds a certain charm to the movie as well.

It's a movie that is also being a typical late '60's/'70's crime movie, filled with money, pretty girls, fast cars, gun fights, backstabbing characters and a story of a man seeking revenge. A movie in the vain of Steve McQueen's "The Getaway", to name an example. Not saying that this movie is still as good though of course but if you like this sort of movies made during that particular time period, chances are you'll like "I bastardi" as well.

Another reason why this movie will appeal to certain people is its cast. It stars Klaus Kinski for instance, who is being deliciously villainous and is really playing a great role. Much better than main lead Giuliano Gemma, who I believe also got dubbed, though it's hard to tell since the sound quality of this movie isn't all that great and Italian productions at the time always got shot without sound and the actors would later do all of their lines in a studio. But the movie also stars big '40's star Rita Hayworth. I had never seen her as an 'elderly' woman. Sort of bad she had to end her wonderful career with these obscure sort of movies, even though this movie most definitely is not a bad one.

It's sort of too bad that the movie is lacking in true excitement and enough action. It would had make the movie such a better one to watch and with a bigger budget they would also mostly most certainly come up with a far better and more spectacular ending as well. Really, the ending instead now is really random and cheap and even made me laugh at how silly it was. A bit of a cop out.

Not a great movie by any means but the fans of the genre will definitely get some joy out of it.

6/10

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Who's the bastard? It's hard to tell in this film because they all are. Maybe it's Guiliano Gemma, a machine-gun totting jewel thief who is a crack shot who guns down fellow bad guys without a second thought. Or maybe it's Klaus Kinski, Guiliano jealous brother who wants those jewels for himself. Or maybe it's their whiskey chugging mother (Hayworth), who is totally out of it when it comes to her two sons trying to kill each other.

Even though it's set in modern America, there's a whole Spaghetti Western feel about the plot as Guiliano is betrayed and crippled by his brother (who instructs doctor Umberto Raho to surgically sever tendons in his arm so he can't shoot anymore), and Guiliano is taken in by a pretty ranch owner (Auger) who nurses him back to health. There's a growing romance between the two but Guiliano just can't let go of the past, getting ready for revenge by using a harp as target practice. Which is a strange choice when you think about it. "Hey Claudine, you got any bottles I can shoot?" "No, just use on of the spare harps I've got."

In tone, this one isn't too far removed from the mid-seventies Eurocrime films, with the gun violence, car chases and sexy, deadly ladies, and Duccio Tessari sure has a certain visual style that keeps things alive. There's a complete 'Eh?' moment very late in the film that comes out of nowhere, but that just adds to the general mean tone of the film.

Man, the good Eurocrime films far outweigh the bad ones. This is another one I recommend.

It's a bit difficult for me to give a final verdict on this movie since, despite the running time given by IMDb, I saw it by way of a crummy bootleg of an Asian TV broadcast that had been chopped down to about 67 minutes. Still, what remained was entertaining enough to keep me watching (and wondering what had been left out).

The Bastard is about a thief who's betrayed by his brother, crime boss Klaus Kinski, and has the tendons in his right hand cut. After that the movie is about the thief licking his wounds, enjoying some sexual healing, learning to shoot with his left hand, and planning his revenge. Then, in an odd and way-out-of-left-field plot device, a natural disaster intercedes and makes the ending feel like a cop-out.

It would be nice if somebody brought out a restored version so people could rediscover this one.