Apparently, this film didn’t get distributed much outside of Italy and France. The listing on IMDb, in the section called AKA(Also Known As) only lists two other titles: a French one and the English one I use, which is called the bootleg title. So this print I found on Youtube was illegally dubbed in English and released here. It’s kind of odd in a number of ways. I’m sure it was recorded off television. At one point about an hour in, a crawl runs along the bottom of the screen in a foreign language. I did see the year 1980 included in that crawl. There were a number of bits in the film that weren’t dubbed also. I’ve seen that before. For some reason, the English versions of most of these movies had eight or nine minutes trimmed and restored versions I’ve seen had those bits with no dubbing. It could be whole short scenes or even cuts within scenes. It can be disconcerting watching two people talking and switching back and forth between English and Italian.
The plot here is one of revenge as seemed the favorite of the spaghetti genre.
Two brothers, one, the younger, a gunman, the older a priest. Andrew(Stephen Forsyth) and Father Louis(Germán Cobos) Willoughby. Andrew hears his brother has taken the vows and hunts him up to let him know he’s proud of big brother. The Father is headed on his donkey to a monastery to which he’d been assigned.
The Mexican bandit leader, Sancho Rodriquez is played by veteran Fernando Sancho, who’s always a joy to watch. He always hams it up, playing loud and happy and violent. His gang raids the monastery to steal a gold and diamond tiara worn by the Virgin Mary statue. The last thing Sancho says before they go in is “No killing! it’s bad luck to kill a Friar!”
So what happens.
You guessed it. They kill every monk in the place, including Father Louis who arrives in the middle of the deed. Sancho doesn’t seem to broke up about it.
Mary Anne(Léa Nanni) is a young peddler who knows the secret of the two brothers. She has a crush on Andrew. You can tell. She takes every chance to torment him, shooting at his feet in one sequence, Mary Anne ia the one who finds the murdered monks and spreads the word.
A dance hall girl/prostitute named Carmen(Antonella Judica) has been staked out by Sancho as his property. Though she hates it, she goes along with the guard watchin her, but manages to sneak around long enough to alert the army about the ones who killed the monks and stole the tiara. Mary Anne overhears that and gets word to Andrew who swears vengeance.
To many want the tiara. Carmen has a plan to get it. Even Andrew figures he deserves it after his brother’s death. It falls to Mary Anne to convince him otherwise.
The thriller that was the basis for the pilot of the TV series The Streets of San Francisco. BRASH BOOKS is bringing out a new edition in February.
Detective Sgt Al Krug and his partner, young Casey Kellogg. With the Santa Monica police, catch a case of a young girl, about twenty, found dead, her body savagely beaten revealed by autopsy. One of a pair of twins, her brother is missing and a lawyer named David J. Farr is tied in some way.
Krug likes him for the murder as he keeps stonewalling the two cops, revealing a bit more with each interview. He’d bailed the girl out after a car wreck and a joint found on her person at the hospital.
There’s also a mystery “uncle” popping up in several spots the twins had been. Krug and Kellogg can find nothing on the man’s existence or even find him.
While Krug feels Farr is the murderer, Kellogg thinks him innocent. The duo plod along as Kellogg pieces various pieces together as a picture slowly emerges.
Nice action thriller, the first of three novls featuring the two cops.
At the right is the original hardcover edition. Book can be pre-ordered HERE.
BRASH BOOKS started with a big release in September of thirty books. February brings us eight more. STORME WARNING is the brand new fourth novel in the Wyatt Storme thriller series.
Storme is a retired NFL player, a wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, who grew tored of the life and lives a hermit-like existence in the Ozarks of his native Missouri in a cabin he built himself. He doesn’t mind people, just not often and not a lot of them. He hunts, has a long time girl friend who spends her weekends with him, and generally enjoys his life away from the limelight.
The land he owns is being used for on location filming of a movie about Jesse James. One part once held a small town he robbed and it’s being recreated by the film’s director.
Getting Wyatt to agree to all that was a job, one that old friend Chick Easton, ex-CIA, now working as a bodyguard for the film’s star, a much hated, but charismatic to the paying customers, young actor, who’d been getting death threats.
Chick also asks Wyatt to back him up and help locate the threat. The problem was that to know the actor was to want to kill him. Obnoxious with a crowd of hangers-on helping him in his wild partying.
To top things off, an old enemy of Wyatt’s, a piece of work named Rory Marchibroda, was out of prison and after revenge. Wyatt hadn’t put him there, but stopped him from his protection racket con with an old army buddy, using a sawed off wooden baseball bat to do so. Rory had been reduced to sticking up curb markets and been caught and sent to prison.
Two fronts and neither of them known at first by Wyatt and Chick.
I like Wyatt Storme. He’s a brash and sarcastic wit. Brash Books plans to bring the first three out as well and based on this one expect them to be good. Hopefully more new books in the series will come. February 3rd is the release date.
