I was never a He-Man fan as such, but there are a few fictional swords I wouldn’t mind swinging over my head. Without naming names, Charles Gramlich, I’m sure there are more than a few of us out there who’d love to do the same. We’re all still little boys inside, however weather-beaten the exterior.
One is never quite sure whether director Mario Gariazzo wanted a comedy, a serious western, or a mash-up of both in ACQUASANTA JOE, this 1971 spaghetti western. We get as picture that never quite seems to morph into anything but a convoluted mess. To be sure, I enjoyed this one despite all it’s faults. But then, I’m a fanatic for this genre anyway.
The plot is simple enough. A bounty hunter banks all his earnings in an Austin establishment. A gang robs the bank with the aid of a stolen army cannon and the bounty hunter goes after his life savings: fifty thousand dollars. Of course the money for the gang doesn’t hurt either. The film is set in late 1865 shortly after the Civil War had ended.
The bounty hunter is Acquasanta Joe played by actor Lincoln Tate. I can’t remember ever seeing him in anything else. Ty Hardin is the gang leader, Jeff Donovan, a former Confederate colonel turned renegade with some of his troop. Hardin is better known for his western series BRONCO. And here’s something I wasn’t aware of until a bit of research turned it up. Hardin was brought in as a replacement for Clint Walker who wanted improvements in Cheyenne. It lead to him getting the Bronco role.
The film seems to be missing a lot, either cut in the version I saw, or not filmed at all, more likely I think. Spaghetti westerns were notoriously low-budgeted and this one seemed even more so. A few bits of dialogue went toward explaining large gaps in the story. We’ll get into that a bit later.
Actor Richard Harrison looked to have been brought in for name recognition only. The handsome American was virtually unknown in his own country, but a huge star in Europe on into the late seventies. His movie star looks and toned, but not overly so, physique got him roles in a number of sword-and-sorcery films, then spaghetti westerns, and on into spy films. His role in Holy Water Joe was short and an ugly end in a hanging. He plays Charlie Bennett, Donovan’s lieutenant.
The plot holes. We see the gang rob the Austin bank, Donovan’s men dressed in Union uniforms. Next, we see Joe grabbing Charlie from the middle of his love nest with a redheaded prostitute. Apparently he ran off with the money from the bank robbery and Donovan is pissed. We only get this from a bit of dialogue between Joe and Charlie. Joe takes him back to Donovan and demands ten thousand for it. Donovan hands it over after a bit of negotiating and Joe leaves.
Beatings, threats, and an escape follow. Joe has helped him escape and wants to know where he hid the money, his money.
Joe has a plan, which he discusses with an army colonel. Of course we are not let in on the plan. We just get it watch it unfold. Disastrously!
Old Charlie is to be hanged.It’s a set-ip with Union troops hidden in the hills around the hanging site. Joe sends his paid informant, a character driving around ina waon with the words “The Sicilian” painted on the sides-possibly a medicine show?, we’re never told- who sets them up and half the hidden troops are killed and Charlie ends up hanged. Hands tied behind his back, his horse bolts during the stretch of gunfire.
Joe has gone to blow up the cannon while that’s happening. He’s intercepted by Donovan’s girl friend, Estella(Silvia Morielli), a beautiful half Indian who looks quite good in the Union cavalry pants sh wears, along with a low slung gun belt and pistol. We next see her dallying with Joe in the bushes just before Donovan captures him.
The whole film seems to be about shifting alliances, Sylvia with Joe. One of Donovan’s men, Sgt. Butch, decides to take over the gang and is sided by the rest. Donovan and Joe slide in and out of partnerships in the second half of the film.
The grand finale finds Butch, the last member of the gang alive, loading and reloading the cannon as Joe and Donovan run toward him. The cannon seems to be conveniently on a small hill that one man, despite Butch’s size and strength, could possibly place it atop and get angled just right. And they must have been a hell of a distance away. Let’s see: pour gun powder, tamp it down, place a cannon ball, tamp it down, light the fuse. A half dozen times.
It all plays out amid some sort of Indian burial ground, with Donovan donning some of the get-up left at a spot, Joe grabbing a well placed bow and arrow set.
A word on the English language dubbing. To say, badly done would be a kindness. The voices for both Donovan and Charlie seemed to be done by the same man with only an accent added to one. To see what sounded like a creaky old sidekick voice coming from both Hardin and Harrison was disconcerting to say the least. Hardin’s character Donovan was a former Confederate officer. When not pulling a job, he woe uniform and cap of the Confederacy. Yet when Joe discusses his plan with a Union general, which as mentioned we never learn, and demands thirty thousand, the general asks why. “He’s an officer who stole my money from the bank. I hold you responsible!” Now why would a Union general be responsible for a renegade Confederate officer? Only once in the film is Holy Water Joe used(and I could find an English language poster), the rest of the time he’s referred to by the Italian name. The print I saw on Youtube must have been the German release used to dub. The title was WEIHWASSER JOE.
There is the usual high body count in a spaghetti western. But in all the close-ups of bodies, not a drop of blood is spotted anywhere.
And finally the music. Comedy all the way. Check the trailer below and see. Not a bit of dialogue, just action and that comedic soundtrack.
It takes a real spaghetti fan to enjoy this one. That’s me. I might not recommend this one to anyone else though.
Nice little collection of tales by some of the greats in the mystery field. Todd Mason Covers it nicely on his blog SWEET FREEDOM. I read this one without knowing he’d done so, missed it I guess(or forgot), and found it when doing a little research on the book.
Loved all these stories though, as Todd noted, in some stories only the slimmest connection to the title. A thin volume, but a fine read read in fairly short order.
For more forgotten books, Todd Mason does the gathering of links this week over at SWEET FREEDOM.
Patti Abbot’s first novel. Something all us fans have been waiting for since she first began publishing her most excellent short stories.
It’s a story of a family played out over fifty years, from the early sixties to today, in a series of short stories linked together much more than the term fix-up implies. Each depends on the previous to advance the story begun with Billie Slack and her efforts to find her father, her “marriage” to Dennis to her son and his family in modern times. A family broken and trying to fix itself all along the way.
The work bears Patti’s style of storytelling and easy readability to make for a fine look at what can happen to a family making decisions, some good, some bad, and how it comes out in the end.
Loved this book and recommend it highly. Published by SNUBNOSE PRESS, it can be had HERE.
My nephew sent me this clip, though it was another site. I found it on Youtube because the other site would only let me load it as a link. The piece is familiar, but my knowledge of this type of music is pretty much limited to Mozart and not a lot of that.
I first became aware of Lee Marvin when my family got their first TV set during the run of his series M SQUAD. I was eight or nine and didn’t know from movies. I likely saw him in a movie or two during that period, but they didn’t stick. It was after those years when I began to be aware of the movie star Lee Marvin.
He stood out in anything he did in those years whether he was the big star of the picture or third or fourth lead.
LEE is a collection of short stories celebrating the actor all through his life from injuries during WWII to his death and everything in between. These stories are fiction, but all are based around real events in the actor’s life. Some fine writers and great stories. The collection opens with a fine introduction by Mike White and I knocked it out in two chunks. Here is the list of titles and contributers.
1944: Hospital Ship – Adrian McKinty
1954: Out On The 101 – Jake Hinson
1959: An Evening At Droopy’s – Scott Philips
1961: The Man Who Shot The Duke – Heath Lowrance
1963: Trust – James Hopwood
1964: A Sort of Intellectual – Jenna Bass
1966: Just Swell – Cameron Ashley
Interlude: Another Day In The Sun – Erik Lundy
1967: The Gun Hunter – Eric Beetner
1968: The Wandrin’ Star -Ray Banks
1968: Gone Fishing – Andrew Nette
1972: Down Mexico Way -Luke Preston
1973: North of The Emperor – Nigel Bird
1976: The Wild Coast: Roger Smith
1980: The Big Red One – Johnny Shaw
1986: And The Gunslinger Followed -Ryan K. Lindsay
1987: Epilogue:-Lee Marvin Is Dead – Jimmy Calloway
James M. Tabor in just two novels has become one of my favorite thriller writers. Hallie Leland is back in FROZEN SOLID, this time on the continent of Antarctica instead of a two mile deep cave in Mexico. An emergency replacement for an old friend that had died from an accidental overdose of heroin, she had only a few days to get the job done before winterover, that eight month period where nothing gets in or out of the base.
She gets her old friend’s room and doesn’t take long to find the camera hidden in the ceiling. Watching the memory card, it confirms suspicions she already had. That her friend was murdered by a man, who’s face she never sees on camera, and made to look like an accident.
So she’s stuck in a small base with a murderer, she has to retrieve an extremophile, an organism able to live in extreme conditions, from a deep water lake found under a mile of ice, and figure out the murderer’s identity. All without the man she seeks getting the wiser.
Then in short order she witnesses three women die very quickly abnd comes under suspicion of bringing in something deadly from the outside.
A fine thriller that keeps the action constant, the suspicions tense, and the danger to Hallie always up front.