Gone with the West

When an innocent convict (James Caan) is released from prison in the Southwest he teams-up with an AmerIndian woman (Stefanie Powers) to exact vengeance on a town of sadistic revelers in the desert. Aldo Ray plays the sinister town boss, Robert Walker Jr. the weary sheriff and Sammy Davis Jr. a black-clad gunslinger.

"Gone with the West" has a strange history: It was actually shot in 1969 under the working title "Man without Mercy," but not released until 1974-1975. This explains how scenes from the movie were available for use in the theater sequence of "Messiah of Evil" (1973). A reedited version with new music and additional scenes (a new intro & conclusion set in modern times) was released in the late 70s under the name "Little Moon and Jud McGraw" wherein Caan's character, Jebediah Kelsey, was changed to Jud McGraw. I viewed the original "Gone with the West" version.

The movie SEEMS like a serious Western with the typical sadism of Spaghetti Westerns (for example, the opening features a woman being raped with a town mob heartily enjoying the spectacle), but the goofy jazz/rock score keys off that it's supposed to be satirical. If there's any doubt, the ending scene tells all. Speaking of the music, it's akin to the groovy rock in low-budget biker flicks, e.g. "The Cycle Savages" (1969), except that a great acoustic piece surfaces occasionally, similar to something Heart would do back then.

When I discerned that the film wasn't to be taken too seriously I started to chuckle with it, a little anyway, and was entertained by several sequences, like the knock-down drag-out brouhaha of two women, Sammy Davis Jr.'s deadpan gunfighter and the guy humorously singing "Abide with Me" deadpan, as well as the over-the-top hellish close.

Unfortunately, the editing is incoherent, like whoever put it together was on acid. Not to mention there's zero meaningful dialogue with Powers babbling in an AmerIndian language the whole time (or was it Spanish?). So, there are items to appreciate in this eccentric Western, but you have to persevere through its outlandishness and defects.

The film runs 1 hour, 32 minutes, and was shot in Las Vegas with the title sequence shot at Vasquez Rocks, California, just north of Los Angeles in the high country.

GRADE: C-

This is possibly the worst western that I have ever seen. The sound, photography, and the acting is awful. I would not blame it all on the actors. This appears to be a film that was possibly started many years earlier, with a different intention. Only to be finished years later with a different story, sloppy narration, and other low quality production values.

Newspaper folk from the city, doing a piece on ghost towns, get an earful from a batty old crone near San Juan Batista who tells them a tall tale of the Old West. Excruciating western, apparently played for laughs, pits lonesome cowpoke James Caan against small town strong-arm Aldo Ray, with Stefanie Powers as an Indian love-interest who apparently doesn't speak English. Showing definite, crippling signs of post-production interference, this threadbare film is so ineptly edited, one feels as though he's watching a proposed pilot for a TV series which never sold. It isn't fair to call the end results a 'film' or a 'movie'...it's simply an excuse for the actors (good ones, mind you) to make a little extra money. Hopefully, the cast and their managers were well-paid. NO STARS from ****

I agree that this move must have originally been unfinished, or else something bad happened during the production - mainly because of the wrap-around present-day footage and narration that is completely redundant. What I can't figure out is how a cheapo movie like this got stars that were (of the time) pretty prominent, especially Caan. Well, Davis can probably be explained, because he appears in only a few scenes that were probably filmed in a day. I got a laugh out of his shiny black leather pants, and Powers was so mind-bogglingly awful (hardly speaking a word of English, by the way) that there was some extra amusement from that. Other than that, this is an incredibly painful western to sit through, with some of the most ludicrous plot turns even to hit the prairie.

Though this film seems to have had a cute idea for a tongue-in-cheek western send-up at its heart, the result was so bad it reminds one of the cheesy pornographic films from the same era. Surely the production values are that low, and and as others have noted, the editing was such as should have earned any film-school student a failing grade. How a name-brand a cast like this one ever got involved with something so poor is to be wondered at. Perhaps no less wondrous is why really awful films like these get released on DVD while so many other infinitely more redeeming ones still fail to see the light of day (I personally am still waiting for "The Secret of Santa Vittoria" with Anthony Quinn). Rest assured, younger viewers, that this disaster is far, far below even the average quality of films of its time. Speaking of which, the 1975 release date cited in these pages cannot be accurate because the Oldsmobile Cutlass so prominently featured in the beginning of the film (yet another waste of otherwise perfectly good celluloid in connection with this movie) was not on the market until the 1978 model year.