Payment in Blood

The Civil War is over. But not for Col. Thomas Blake (Guy Madison). He leads a gang of marauders who terrorize the area around the Mexican border, looting and pillaging, all in the name of the Confederacy. Blake dispatches Chamaco Gonzalez to the town of Manassas to learn the location of a lost Confederate payroll, presumably buried after the surrender at Appomattox by Gen. Beauregard's soldiers. But Camacho gets himself captured and has a date with a firing squad.

Enter a stranger named Stuart (Edd Byrnes) who rescues Chamaco and thereby earning a meeting with Blake.

He claims to know where the payroll is buried. He wants Blake's help in retrieving it, with the end goal of helping Southerners suffering because of the war.

Blake, of course, has other ideas for the buried fortune. With a handpicked group of men back across the Rio Grande to fetch the payroll, which Stuart says is buried in a sacred cave of the Apaches, near the town of Durango.

Along the way, a pretty lady named Manuela shows up, offering her assistance.

First up, Francesco De Masi's score is awesome, livening up the proceedings even more. Payment in Blood is the third Ed Brynes' spaghetti western and it's the serious one of the two. Not much humour, just a straightforward action tale that moves at a clip and provides a fair amount of uneasy alliances, double crosses and lead flying, body count piling up. It's quite fun with Guy Madison stealing the scene as Blake, an untrusting leader of a gang. Ed Brynes does well as the clean cut hero who has an agenda to fulfil. The finale set in an Indian burial ground is really exciting.

This was the fifth(!) Spaghetti Western I've watched from director Castellari (whom I met at the 2004 Venice Film Festival) – it's not too bad an effort actually, though still far away from the admirably elegiac quality he would eventually achieve in KEOMA (1976).

The plot is pretty typical of the genre: after the end of the Civil War, a Confederate Colonel (Guy Madison) wants to keep up the fight and recruits a band of outlaws to finance his campaign through random pillaging; given that the original Italian title makes an explicit reference to the fact that the gang totals seven men, I guess the film intended to be a roguish version of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960)! Anyway, as expected, an outsider (Edd Byrnes) soon joins their ranks – after having rescued one of them (Enio Girolami, the director's brother and who, in the role of a peon, irritatingly speaks almost exclusively in Spanish throughout!). However, it transpires (equally unsurprisingly) that he's really a government agent out to ensnare Madison and his men by ostensibly leading them to a buried cache' of Confederate money! Along the way, a female character is also thrown into the fray – which, naturally, causes discord among the Colonel and his 'underlings' since, rather than share her with them as was their habit, he decides to keep her for himself; at the end, she too turns out to have been on the side of the law (and in cahoots with Byrnes all along)!

The film features plenty of action – set to a rousing score by Francesco De Masi – and climaxes agreeably with an atmospheric sequence set inside a cave (where the now worthless money is stashed) that served as burial ground for some Indian tribe or other.

Ticks all the right boxes with some whacky characters and several exciting action sequences. The musical score is half decent to. The story concerns a Confederate Major, who is caring on his own private campaign and after the official surrender. Sort of plays like an inferior 'Hellbenders' by the great Sergio Corbucci. The lower score of six, is just a comparison to the many other, better examples of this particular genre but the fans will still enjoy.

This is the second film of Enzo G. Castellari I have seen, after KEOMA. It's not as original as the latter but provides good entertainment. The opening starts with a pseudo-documentary narrative which introduces the characters. While in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN the introduced characters are the heroes here they are the baddies. Later the characters aren't much further developed, though. The strong aspect of the film is the uncertainty about the intentions of the Stuart character, well played by Edd Byrnes. He doesn't seem to be a good guy but maybe there is a reason why he kills so many innocent people. Guy Madison plays equally convincing his counterpart Blake.

Overall an OK violent western with a good Francesco De Masi score which supports the pace of the story.

5 / 10.

Enzo G. Castellari was a director who seemed to contribute films in a variety of genres, from sci-fi to giallo. I get the feeling that his best ones are his spaghetti westerns though. In Payment in Blood he delivers a pretty solid entry. Its story features a renegade Confederate colonel who refuses to accept the South's defeat in the American Civil War and so continues the fight with a band of outlaws. A stranger saves one of his gang from execution and is taken into their fold when he reveals that he knows the whereabouts of a casket of buried money.

It would only be fair to say that the plot-line has quite a few similarities with Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy. Its hero, however, looks a little different from the shady leads from other spaghettis. He looks more like a character from an American traditional western, although he still has the same amorality and essentially acts in a similar way. The villains are decent enough and there is a fair amount of violent action to keep us entertained. Things are wrapped up with an interesting enough climax in an Indian burial ground, located in a cave. Overall, this is an entertaining, if unremarkable, western and should definitely find approval with fans of the Italian strand.