BY JOHN M. WHALEN
“Bad Man’s River†(1971) may be one of the most-unappreciated
spaghetti westerns that Lee Van Cleef ever made. This bizarre comedy-western
directed by Eugenio Martin (as Gene Martin) languished for a long time in the dollar
DVD bin at your local video store after having fallen into public domain. Most
reviews indicate that the DVD was a mess, and that the movie itself was one of
the worst films Martin, and Van Cleef ever had anything to do with. Well,
thankfully, Kino Lorber has rescued “Bad Man’s River†from the video trash heap
and released a good wide-screen transfer of the movie on Blu-ray. It may not be
among Van Cleef’s top ten all-time best movies, but it isn’t that bad either.
In fact, it’s pretty entertaining.
Martin, best known for the cult-horror classic, “Horror
Express†(1972), worked from a script by Hollywood veteran Philip Yordan.
Yordan previously had turned out some great screenplays for blockbusters like
“El Cid,†and “King of Kingsâ€, cult favorites such as “Johnny Guitar,†film
noirs such as “The Big Combo†and “The Chase†(reviewed by Cinema Retro on May
13, 2016), and dozens of others. For “Bad Man’s River,†it appears that Yordan
decided to write a story that was basically a Looney Tunes send-up of the usual
spaghetti western plot. In essence, this comes down to: one character double
crosses another and they both get double crossed by somebody else, and on it
goes until the big gundown at the finale. In this case it’s a woman who does
all the double dealing, and what a woman she is—Gina Lollabrigida.
Van Cleef plays bank robber Roy King. He and the three
members of his gang (which includes Gianni Garko as Ed, Simon Andreu as Angel,
and Jess Hahn as Odie) rob a bank by digging underground up into the vault.
They make their getaway by train and split up, after which Roy runs into the
beautiful Alicia (Lollabrigida). She knows he’s got some loot, so she convinces
him to marry her on the train. (She conveniently happens to travel with a
preacher.) After the ceremony, she asks him if there was any insanity in his
family. Martin pulls the camera back from a tight close up of Roy and we see
he’s in a straight-jacket. Next thing he knows he’s in a mental institution. (See
what I mean by Looney Tunes?) But it’s no problem. He’s a dynamite expert and blasts
his way out of the funny farm and rejoins his former gang members to pull
another job. Turns out the woman behind a plan to blow up the Mexican
government’s stash of munition’s hidden in an old mission, is none other than Alicia.
She’s married to a Mexican politician now named Francisco Paco Montero (Daniel
Martin). When Roy first reunites with Alicia she says, “I’ve been expecting
you.†Roy says, “I had a hard day at the office.†She says “It’s big of you not
have hard feelings.†And he replies, as he’s taking off his clothes, “Your need
was greater†as he hops into the sack with her.
She introduces him to her new husband and they plan the
job, for which Roy and his gang will make ten grand. They blow up the mission
but guess what? There’s no ten grand. Alicia explains the real plan to Roy. Now that they’ve blown up the munitions, the
Mexican government will send $1 million to Montero ostensibly to buy more guns.
But of course, once they got the money they’ll all split it up. But there’s yet
another twist when Roy discovers the guy who was supposed to be Montero really
wasn’t. He was a double. The real Montero is James Mason, with one of the worst
Spanish accents ever preserved on film. He sounds like a Mexican by way of
Biloxi, Miss.
So at this point we’re only two-thirds of the way through
the movie. The rest involves more double crosses, that include the leader of
the Mexican Revolutionaries, Col. Enrique Fierro (Sergio Fantoni), who falls
another victim of Alicia’s charms. It all sounds pretty tedious, but if you
roll with it, and take it for the satire that it at least tries to be, you can
get some laughs out of it.
Van Cleef does well with this rare stab at comedy, even sporting a
dorky hair piece and a derby. It seems like everyone had a pretty good time
making the movie. Lollabrigida was a bit past her prime, but still sexy and just
the right age for Van Cleef. She’s very convincing as a femme fatale of whom
one character says: “She isn’t afraid of anything, except poverty.â€
Kino Lorber presents the film in a 2.45:1 widescreen
aspect ratio, which does justice to the 35mm print shot in Franscope. The audio
is an adequate 2.0 lossless mono soundtrack. The eccentric soundtrack by Waldo de los Rios,
which includes everything from rock music to abarbershop quartet, is
well-presented. A lot of people
criticized Rios’s music but I thought it fit the totally wacky premise of the
whole movie, which I suppose you could sum up as “Cherchez la femmeâ€â€”spaghetti western-style.
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John M. Whalen is the author of "Hunting Monsters is My Business: The Mordecai Slate Stories" . Click here to order the book from Amazon)