Seven Dollars to Kill

Sette Dollari Sul Rosso / Seven Dollars to Kill

March 16, 1966

Bandits kill the wife of Johnny Ashley. They also take his young son, Jerry. Now Johnny vows revenge. Mostly he just spends his time in the wilderness, doing random acts of goodness. Time passes, and half-breed Jerry is all grown up. He's gotten mean too. The gang has come into some gold, and they intend to split up with their booty.

'How do you carry that child? He's not a sack of potatoes.'

Johnny does not talk about his revenge. He does his revenge. (Well, whenever he gets around to it.) This is a simple revenge picture, with estranged father and son who have to form a bond for the first time. The best thing about this one is the mountain scenery in the first half, which makes a pleasant treat for the eyes, even in a bad Youtube transfer. In the second half, we move onto a standard western town. I dig the bleakness of the ending. It gets an extra half star for that ending. When it comes to family business, we're all just rolling in the mud.

Get me an Eastwood type. Get me a John Phillip Law type. Get me an Emilo Fernandez type. Now we can make a movie. Bronzed up Steffen is wooden as it gets, but he's not afraid to get nasty, breaking into a bandit's cave lair and blowing him away. Miali is possibly even more wooden. On the other hand, Sancho is a lot of fun as the fat bad guy. Elisa Montes sings a song about 'Wishville.' Wishville was also referenced in the director's 1000 Dollari Sul Nero (1966.) We're all half-breeds if you think about it. (I rather suspect that I have no breeding at all.) The ability to shoot locks saves you on the expense of keys. Of all the ways to go, I would not want to fall and hit my head on a rock. Our hero is named John Ashley, but this one never appeared in a single Beach Party movie. (Hey, one of our female characters does kind of look like Annette!) Sombrero, mustache, and ammo belt. That's the look I want to emulate. There's a little bit more greenery of forest than you see in most spaghetti westerns. Stock footage of a western town is cut in, and even on Youtube, the quality difference is apparent. Pawing a bar wench is what a bandit does. Look, if a bar wench doesn't wear a low-cut blouse, I question the entire basis of reality. (Her hair is right out of the 1960s though.) The ability to roll down stairs and shoot bad guys at the same time is something else. Poor Jerry is shooting his guns in the street.

'Oro!'

Alberto Cardone also directed 20,000 Dollari Sul 7. (That's considerably more expensive than this movie.) Anthony Steffen was in An Angel for Satan (1966.) Elisa Montes was in Captain Apache (1971.) Fernado Sancho was in La Resa Del Conti (1967.) Roberto Miali also appeared as the dumb-mute brother in 1000 Dollari Sul Nero (1966.) Loredana Nusciak was in Django (1966.)

*** / *****

There is little good about this movie, in fact I would have to be tied down to my chair and forced to waitch it again.

The acting including the lead, is woeful to say the least!.

Sets move at times and the script writer/s must have gotten their knowledge of the wild West from a penny western book. (old Western comic like books of the 50's).

It's hard to describe the sound of gun fire in this movie, but it's unlike any gun ever fired, including the flintlock.

As for fist fightng, we'll the acting is so poor, that you can see punches thrown, but clearly missed by 12 to 18 inches.

When someone is hit or shot, they seem to stay upright for a week before screaming and hitting the ground.

All I can say is Clint Eastwood saved the spaghetti westerns for sure, if this is typical of those produced at the time.

Simply Dreadful.

A cowboy( Anthony Steffen)seeks for years the evil bandit (Fernando Sancho) who murdered his wife and kidnapped her newborn son. When he finally manages to find him, he attains the vengeance he has longed for and ends with him, but his son will be against him as the bandit raises the child as his own son, ensuring that the final showdown has the added angst ridden element of father facing son.

Seven Dollars on the Red boasts a competent cast and a memorable soundtrack, and though a little unremarkable and slightly muddled its strong plot helps overcome this. Steffen is very good in the lead, and so is a dead-eyed Roberto Miali and a radiant Elisa Montes - they play the stolen son and his doomed love interest. It presents a hand-to-hand fight in the barn which is an eye opener, and it ends with a rain soaked showdown with father vs son. The last twenty minutes are quite tense and emotional. Not a bad spaghetti western.

Fernanda Sancho and his legions of guffawing sidekicks rob and kill Anthony Steffan's wife, and steal his son to be brought up as a red-headed bandido. Steffan makes it his life mission to track them down, which takes an awfully long time...

Decades, it seems. By this time Anthony's son has grown up to be a full on chuckling, card dealing, people killing jerk of the highest order (just like his adopted dad Sancho). Can Steffan rehabilitate his son and reunite them in time for coffee and fainting or are they going to be squaring off against each other, as they do in these films? This one kind of meanders all over the place in the middle, as we follow Steffan around doing stuff in an indestructible way, but then we see him taking a kicking off some bad guys, and then we sidestep into a romantic interlude with his son and this girl (or is it?). It's not quite the most exciting Spaghetti Western I've watched, although it is made well enough.

It's hard to imagine Fernando Sancho wasn't like that in real life. Somebody find out and get back to me.

At the very beginning of the film, there is a little prologue that is all written in Italian--and so I had no idea whether or not this was important. I saw the film on a disc that included: 7 Dollars on Red / Apocalypse Joe / Bounty Killer / Minnesota Clay. Perhaps if there are other versions out there that they will have captioning for the portion. As for the rest of the film, like most Italian westerns we get here in the States, it's dubbed.

"Seven Dollars on the Red" begins with a group of bandits slaughtering a household. A young boy is left unharmed and the bandit leader decides to adopt the kid. Little does the bandit know that the boy's father was not home and vows to do everything he can to find the boy. But, everything is not good enough and years pass--and the nice kid slowly evolves into a vicious jerk just like his foster dad.

If you are looking for an Italian film of the quality of a Sergio Leone or even a Sergio Carbucci film, then keep looking. This one is actually a bit funny, since the guns didn't even use blanks--and the actors had to pretend that the guns were firing something. However, the gun sounds were added later and it comes off as kind of funny seeing the men jerking the guns even though nothing is coming out (even a blank will appear out of the barrel the same as a normal bullet). Plus, they also seemed to have tried to save money by eliminating blood--making the bullet-riddled bodies oddly clean and without bullet holes. The film also has only fair music--nothing particularly haunting or memorable about the tunes. The bottom line is that the Italians made hundreds of westerns--some good, some bad and some ugly. I'd rank this among the ugly--kind of cheap but reasonably entertaining if you are looking for just a time-passer.