It's surprising to see how fast Sergio Corbucci's career declined. Only two years earlier he was making COMPANEROS, one of the high-points of the mid spaghetti western period. For SONNY AND JED he united his 'muse' Tomas Milian with Susan George fresh from Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS the previous year and Tellys Savalas who was at the time enjoying a prolonged vacation in the Mediterranean by making Italian b-movies. Despite of the cast however, the movie is a dim shadow of COMPANEROS. Certainly a let-down by Corbucci's usual standards, which he would go on to follow with another two poor westerns, essentially ending his career in the western as ingloriously it began (MASSACRE AT RED CANYON).
SONNY AND JED in its way reflects the ongoing the decline of the genre that Corbucci both helped shape and found his niche in by making the transition from the peplum he used to make under alias Stanley Corbett in his earlier days and with cheesy titles like Goliath and the Island of Vampires. It's a gritty, crass, vulgar tale of two unpleasant people, scruffy bandit Jed and feisty tomboy Sonny, hitching up together in a nameless patch of Roman countryside substituting for a nameless part of the West and going on a robbing spree while a monomaniac sheriff dressed in a fur (!) and his posse gun after them. The couple-of-criminals-on-the-loose idea seems to be a loan from BONNY AND CLYDE and Milian and Susan George have enough chemistry to see it through even when their constant bickering crosses the line from amusing to annoying. Milian's Jed is cut from that mould of distinctly latino temperament, the kind of uncomplicated picaresque irreverence Italians loved to introduce in their characters because it borough the western back home in a way, which owes a big debt to Tuco from Leone's GBU (as do all the characters of that lineage).
In the end the movie doesn't amount to much and the questionable choice of undermining Tellys Savalas' suave menace by turning him from a cruel, methodic badass into a staggering blind does a good job of cutting the legs from the movie's climax, but it's still peppered with memorable moments that save the day. Great examples of spaghetti western visual irony involving coffins and barns, snappy one-liners, hilarious bits like the scene when Jed enters a photographer's shop and demands to know why his photo is missing from the "Wanted" posters he's printing, a general sense of comic-book irreverence that is at once violent and funny, Sonny and Jed, although far from a rousing success, still has enough of these little moments to recommend it to genre fans.
