The title character is a small mechanical toy, the only thing our hero finds in the ruins of his home when he comes home from the war, a Union officer(Ty Hardin who we know only as the Stranger), finding the home burned to the ground. His wife and son had been murdered. A lot of the film is flashbacks, from The Stranger’s point of view as well as some of the villains.
The glaring plot hole is The Stranger says he knows all of the men who did this but the laeder. How did he know this? The ashes were cold. And if he knew the participants, how did he not know the leader.
The drummer toy is used to terrorize his targets, he winding it up, setting it on the ground, and saying “When it stops, make your move!”
He uses a multitude of disguise. mostly a doomsayer predicting dire consequences as the men are shot down. Also, an undertaker.
This film has a checkered history. As was common back then, the English language release was heavily cut. The version I saw had most of those scenes restored, mostly add-ons to longer ones. You’d be watching and they would break into Italian for a few senrences. Especially noticeable in the wild west sequence. Spaghetti vet Craig Hill has a small role as O’Connor, the owner of the wild west show. During his spiel, he went back and forth from English and Italian. An Indian girl from the show, Rising Sun(Rossano Brazzi), aids The Stranger.
Two other vets had parts as well. Gordon Mitchell was the thinnest as a deputy and Rossano Brazzi was more prominent as the Sheriff.
The music score was mostly borrowed from The Hellbenders.
KILL THE POKER PLAYER is the title of the American release of this 1972 spaghetti western, a fairly innocuous one as spaghettis go. The print I watched on Youtube, low quality by the way, had it labeled with this title. But within the film credits, it had a title I thought much better: Creeping Death. That comes from the killer’s use of poisonous snakes.
The movie opens with a bank robbery, one million dollars. The stick-up man uses a six gun with a silencer attached (don’t explain them). After relieving them of the cash, he shoots the president and two clerks. As it’s a windy day, the little sound he makes with his silenced gun is covered. In the saloon, a confederate decked out as a union officer is on hand. The bank president, not dead, staggers out with a gun. We learn there’s a third man, unseen, who shoots the bank man. The Union officer guns down those in the bar when they react and the two men beat it out of town.
Shortly they are joined by the third man while eating. The camera angle, the big hat, and never showing him from the front, guarantee we will not know the man. The first two man wake up later to find poisonous snakes sitting on their chests.
That’s the mystery of this film. Who is the third man that cold-blood murdered his partners?
Robert Wood rides into town and identifies himself as Jonathan Pinkerton, an agent for Lloyd’s of London who’d insured the bank money. It’s his job to find thaat third man and the money. a two hundred thousand dollar reward is on the line.
A number of suspects are offered. The sheriff Lewis Burton(Frank Braña), who Pinkerton witnesses shooting down an outlaw he’d induced to surrender, Doctor Norton( Ernesto Colli), a zoologist who specializes in snakes would seem the obvious suspect. Third on the list is a saloon owner(Carlo Gaddi) and his girl friend(Nieves Navarro, billed as Susan Scott), and a local rancher, Clinton( Ivano Staccioli ), who claims to be broke from rustling, horse thievery, and bad poker playing.
Halfway through we learn Pinkerton is really Alan Fields, a Federal agent brought in on the case.
Someone wants him off the case though as he’s constantly challenged by groups of men. Forynately he’s handy with his fists and gun, whatever’s needed.
Then the suspects start getting knocked off and Fields is framed for them. But he keeps pushing until the third man reveals himself.
Spaghetti western icon Giuliano Gemma played another icon in this western very late in the spaghetti genre. Tex Willer was an Italian comic character first appearing in 1948. It was Italy’s take on the western genre. Tex was the most popular comic translated into over thirty languages, never English as far as I’ve been able to determine.
Tex Willer was a tough minded, though ethical character who lived in Arizona, while being a Texas ranger(I just report them, I don’t explain them. He defended Indians, married a Navajo woman, eventually becoming a chief. He also protected the innocent of all types of people. He’s been given the name of Night Eagle and wears almost a superhero emblem on his buckskin shirt: a white circle with a black eagle silhouette in the middle.
As the movie opens, Tex and his Navajo friend Tiger Jack(Carlo Mucari) find a murdered Navajo, left to rot on open ground. While Tiger buries the fellow, Tex rides ahead following the trail of two men on horseback with a wagon. It doesn’t take long before he finds two old enemies selling liquor to the Navajo. Tex had warned them about that and they paid with their lives.
Shortly, an old friend comes looking for Tex. A fellow Ranger named Kit Carson(no, not that one) played by spaghetti vet William Berger. He wants Tex to help find an army shipment, 300 rifles, stolen while being shipped. It was led by an old friend of the two men. Tex, along with Tiger Jack, set out with Carson to see what they can find. What they locate is the ambush site and men mummified in some sort of manner. Tiger finds a medallion of some type of animal lying at the site.
A sheriff in town recognizes it as belonging to an Indian that worked for the shipper, Bedford(Frank Braña) and interestingly enough he’d had a number of shipments taken in the last few months. All army stuff, weapons.
A fast shoot out and a gruesome death follow as they witness the mummifying process, which takes all of about thirty seconds. The Indiam they were looking for uses a blow gun to do the deed.
Therre’s a mystery here. Deep in Mexican mountains, a forbidden region, live a number of tribes, all descended from the Aztecs. They live peacefully, but one tribe has the idea of reuniting them all and slaughtering anybody with Spanish blood. Or white blood for that matter. There’s a princess
that doesn’t seem to have a lot to do either. But look good. They worship the Lord of the Abyss and get the mummifying weapon from him, a bit of volcanic rock.
An interesting film with a bit of magic thrown in and a character I was entirely unfamiliar with. The trailer below(one must click through to watch it on Youtube) has som of the artwork interspersed in the scenes.
One thing I always have been bothered by while watching these many spaghetti westerns over the last few years is the voices used in the English dubbed versions. So many American actors, the voices you know so well, that have these weird sounds spouting English. A couple here. Lee Van Cleef always did his parts in English(dubbed in the original Italian one presumes), but actors Richard Boone and Jack Palance were dubbed with passingly strange voices.
This film came late in the spaghetti genre and all the major actors were late in their careers as well, a bit long in the tooth. Except Sibyl Danning. She still looked great.
Van Cleef plays twin brothers, John and Lewis. As boys, their father taught them how to use the short gun. Both were quite good, though John was faster on the draw. Then a strange thing happened. John turned away from the gun and became a priest. Lewis was a gambler, then killed a man he caught cheating at cards when the man tried to shòot him with a derringer. Four more died trying to avenge the first death. Father John talks his brother into giving up the gun and Lewis goes into Mexico and starts a family. John keeps the gun in trust for him.
Leif Garrett is young Johnny, Sibyl Danning Jenny, his mother. She runs the local saloon. Johnny worships Father John, helping him at the church. He finds Lewis’s gun and the Father says Lewis lives somewhere in Mexico.
Jack Palance is Clayton, who, along with his nephews, rob a string of banks. They hit town to celebrate and the brother murders a man with a knife in the back. They take off.
Here’s where things get odd.
Father John takes off after them. Not a very alert bunch. Only one guard while they sleep, it allows Father John, after knocking out the guard, and apologizing to God, to slip into their camp where they have all their guns conveniently in piles so he can spirit them away.
The nephew is returned to town where a swift trial and a hanging is promised. Except Clayton breaks him out, takes over the town, and Father John is killed.
The next oddity. Johnny takes Lewis’s gun and goes looking for him. Though he only knows somewhere in Mexico, in two days he finds Lewis. The murder of Father John has struck Johnny dumb and he has to draw a picture to make himself understood.
Lewis and Johnny head back, Lewis with revenge on his mind. But he decides not to use a gun, pretending to be the ghost of Father John and getting the gang scared and knocking each other off.
And the third strange thing I won’t mention other than that it involves Clayton, Johnny, and his mother Jenny.
There’s a number of versions of DEATH ON HIGH MOUNTAIN posted on Youtube. Varying lengths from an hour and twenty-three minutes to one hour and forty seven minutes. U.S. releases in the spaghetti genre tended to trim the original Italian versions probably to squeeze more showings per day in American theaters. The one I watched was apparently a partially restored version with a whole section at the end in Italian. I’ve seen it before. Restored scenes were never dubbed in English. The point at the end where the Italian clip begins was a break point. With the exclusion of the last scene, the ending was slightly changed. But not by much, The plot here is a hunt for three hundred thousand in cash, stolen by a Mexican gang led by a preening bandit, the self styled General Valente(Tano Cimarosa), wearing a preposterous, gold epaulet on the shoulders, jacket laden with medals. The man really behind the gang is a local businessman named Braddock(Antonio Gradoli). The money is then stolen by a young man of the area, Loring Vandervelt(Peter Lee Lawrence). There’s a mysterious stranger in town, Francis Parker(Luis Dávila, billed as Louis Dawson) that helps the young man and his sister Daphne(Agnès Spaak) out now and again, other times seeming to work at cross purposes. It’s not to much a plot heavy film, filmed with the obligatory saloon brawl that runs over long, inappropriate comedy bits with accompanying goofy music, way to many scenes seemingly thrown in just to get some action . Not one of the finer films in the genre. Fernando Cerchio(billed asFred Ringold directed this one from a script by Lorenzo Gicca Palli(dialogue and story) (as Enzo Gicca Palli), with screenplay by José Mallorquí (as José Mallorquí Figueroa) and Eduardo Manzanos Brochero. A middling example of the genre. The clip below is thr film version I watched and actually carried the Spanish title, the poster below the clip/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qk3TnAA3Vk
Mickey Hargitay is Ringo Carson and Gordon Mitchell is Frank Sanders. Before the war they’d been friends and partners. The pair do jobs for money. They were hired by saloon owner Walcom(Amedeo Trilli, billed as Mike Moore) to rescue his daughter Jane(Milla Sannoner), being held for ransom by a group of Mexicans. It seems to be a regular occurrence as it’s mentioned this is the third attempt. When they hit the Mexican camp, Ringo, the better shot, provides cover fire while Sanders rescues Jane.
This sets up a triangle of sorts. Sanders is attracted to Jane, but she has her eye on Ringo. Dad doesn’t want to pay the agreed on fee, which Ringo had upped at the last moment and the two friends end up in a brief shoot-out, with Ringo and Chase shooting the guns out of their opponent’s hands.
The banker and the bad boy of the film, is Daniels(Ivano Staccioli, billed as John Heston). He forces Walcom to pay the two men. His thing is he’s after three pieces of land with gold on it that only he knows about.
Ringo and Chase end up fighting over the affections of Jane, Ringo winning, and the friendship ended. Chase rides off.
From that point, the film jumps a number of years to the last days of the war. Ringo and Jane had married, had a son(who looks about seven), and Ringo was sheriff of the town his father had founded. Mama Carson had reconciled(three years before the early events, she’d tossed him out for his money hungry ways). Now he was the only thing that kept Daniels at bay.
When Ringo forms a posse to go after marauding Rebs, he’s hurt rescuing a small boy from a burning house when a beam hits the back of his head. It costs him his sight. As he’s about to be killed, the Rebel leader, which happens to be old friend Frank Chase, stops them. They return him home where the doctor says his sight could return, possibly, after another head blow.
Chase, since Ringo is now blind, is offered the Sheriff’s job, which suits both Daniels and Walcom. Daniels still wants those three properties and Walcom wants his gun running to Mexico overlooked. Chase is given orders to get those three deeds.
But Mama Carson has her own plans. The other two land owners go into partnership with her, letting her hols the deeds to their land. She turns them over to Ringo who hides them, aided by his friend Tom(Spartaco Conversi, billed as Spean Convery).
Mama is shot to death by three masked me sent to find the deeds when she surprises them, Jane and the blind Ringo are savagely beaten, Ringo receiving a number of boots to his head.
Guess what?
Correct, His sight starts returning just in time for him to go a revenge jag. His son is missing(granddad is hiding him from Daniels and Chase. Jane is under arrest. And Ringo and Tom are off plotting a way to rescue them.
Gordon Mitchell’s Frank Chase is a complex character. He wants to be a bad boy, but, though it’s been years since they partnered, he still has affection for Ringo. Oh, he wants Jane and makes his play, but will not force himself on her. Though he goes after Ringo and Tom, he won’t kill them and shows his true colors in the finale of the film.
A few thoughts:
Not a bad film, but a couple of curiosities.
This was the early days of the spaghetti western genre(even before it acquired that umbrella title). They seemed not quite have a handle on westerns yet. Generally right, but in the fight scenes, they bad boys, all of them, had a tendency to fan the triggers on their six guns. It was odd seeing a dozen men in a scene all fanning their triggers.
Another scene had a saddled horse in the back ground playing. At least that’s what it looked like. Getting down and rolling in the dirt, jumping up, getting back down, all while the actors did their parts in the foreground.
Emimmo Salvi durected from a script by Ambrogio Moltoni and Salvi, story by by James Wilde. Don’t think I’ve run across any of them in other films.
The first thing I noticed when I started watching I WANT HIM DEAD was that it seemed far different from most in the spaghetti genre I’ve watched over the last few years. Everything about it was superior. Production values, costumes, the sets, the script. Far above the cheeziness found in the majority.
Don’t get me wrong. The cheese is part of the charm I’ve come to know and love.
This one was more on the level of the best of the genre: the Leones, the Carbuccis.
Craig Hill stars as Clayton, a man who wants to buy a ranch for his sister and himself. He’d been saving money for several years. One problem: it was Confederate currency. He becomes bent on revenge when he finds his sister Mercedes(Cristina Businari) raped and murdered, a tobacco pouch found lying by her side. A little investigation found it identified as belonging to a fellow named Jack Blood(José Manuel Martín). He and a friend had left just before Clayton arrived.
Now he had his target.
But that was only a subplot to the main one. Jack Blood worked for a businessman, Mallek(Andrea Bosic) who’d invested heavily in arms and ammunition. The Civil War was winding down and he’d gotten wind of a meeting between two generals, one from the north and one from the south, meeting to discuss terms for an armistice before Grant and Lee met. Mallek stood to lose a great deal of money should the war end before he could sell off his stock, estimated at a million dollars in rifles, ammunition, and heavy weapons. With that in mind, he was offering Blood and his team $50,000 to kill the generals and make both sides think the other was responsible.
All Clayton had on his mind was Blood until he meets two women held for the gang’s pleasure. Aloma(Lea Massari) and Marisa(Licia Calderón) were the pair and Clayton begins to fall for Aloma.
Of cpurse along the way he gets several beatings, whipped, and lays waste to most of the gang. A fight over the $50,000 leaves money scattered along the trail, nortern dollars, and Clayton gets his four thousand.
A pretty good western. Carlos Sarabia wrote the script and it was directed by Paolo Bianchini.
I’m not sure about the title BLOOD AT SUNDOWN. There appears to be two films with that title and Anthony Steffen stars in both of them. Gianni Garko is co-starred in the other. I’m going with the alternate U.S. title for this one. It’s a film about two feuding families with the daughter of one loving the son of the other. Hmmm? That sounds familiar.
The McDougalls and the Lopezs are the two families. Andy McDougall(Armando Guarnieri, billed as Jack Warner) heads one and Lopez, no other name given(José Calvo, billed as Joseph Calvo) is the main man of the other. Some time in the past, years back, McDougall does something that puts Lopez in a wheelchair. He swore revenge.
Steffen is Steve McDougall who deserts the army when he learns his father Andy has been killed by the Lopez family. Tied to a tree and everyone who worked for Lopez puts one bullet into the helpless man. Seventeen including Lopez and his son Manuel.
Steve finds his sister Judy(Ida Galli, billed as Evelyn Stewart) and their uncle Sam(Franco Pesce, billed as Frank Campbell) at the family ranch.
We learn that Steve and Lopez’s daughter Pilar(Gemma Cuervo, billed as Jennifer Crowe) were once a thing. Both daddies hadn’t been happy about that.
Killings back and forth, with a pair of brothers working for Lopez figuring in and double-crossing everybody.
This was a cheap jack production with a bunch of odd stuff. When Steve and Manuel had their gunfight in the street, stalking up to each other, the sound effects were obviously someone walking across a wooden floor instead of dirt. Bizarre. And Steve never fires a shot that he doesn’t hit somebody. In the climactic horseback chase, with Steve’s sister a prisoner, he’s firing from a galloping horse into the bunch, never a thought that he might hit her, but never missing.
This film, as seemed to be the case back then, had several American titles. Fifteen Scaffolds For The Killer(variant 15 Scaffolds) were the other two. The title comes from the two groups of men being pursued by a posse of almost every able bodied man in town.
It opens with a raid on a ranch for a large horse herd. Most of the hands are shot down in the raid, the rest in the chase. The bandits are lead by Sandy Cassel(George Martin) and the job is observed by a trio on a hill above. Billy Mack(Craig Hill) is the boss of that bunch. They’d been on the way to steal the herd themselves. Billy Mack observed that they would have left the owner alive.
Cassel and his gang sell the herd and then stop at a ranch for the night. It’s owned by a woman and her two daughters, all three attractive, the older girl getting married the next day. They ask for water and food, are offered the barn, and settle in. One man wants to play cards for the women, but Cassel puts a stop to it. Billy Mack and his two partners arrive at the ranch and trouble almost erupts. Mack and Cassel settle for their own kind of partnership. Mack will steal the horses and sell them, then Cassel can do the same.
They bed down for the night.
The next morning, early, the fiance arrives and we catch a glimpse of someone slipping out of a window. He finds the woman and her daughters strangled. The Fifteen are still asleep in the barn and the fiance returns to town to round up a posse. While that happens, Cassel and Mack find the dead women, figure one of them did the deed, then flee when the posse arrives.
That sets the scene for the rest of the film. Battles, the fifteen taking the town temporarily, then running with a hostage, Barbara Ferguson(Susy Anderson), wife of the preacher leading the posse with the sheriff.
They are finally run down at an old fort where some Mexican families are living and the battles continue.
There is also an older man who hangs on the fringes and has us wondering who he might be. He’s bought the ranch next to the dead women and seems highly interested in what’s happening.
Cassel and Mack have a falling out as their men are whittled down.
The mystery is who is the killer, who the older man is, and will any of the fifteen survive. Oh, and Mrs. Ferguson seems to be falling for Mack.
He looks like a hick, a sort of traveling preacher, riding a horse more suited to a plow. His gun holster is on a rope and hangs near his knees. But he’s unnaturally good with it.
He’s known only as Requiescant, Latin for Rest In Peace.
Lou Castel plays the odd man who remembers nothing about his past. We, though, see that he’s the only survivor of a massacre of a band of Mexicans by a group of Confederates late in the war, 1864, a small boy creased by a bullet across the top of his head. He’s found wandering by a traveling preacher and his wife and daughter and raised as a son.
Ten years go by and the daughter has left, run off with a group of actors into Missouri. The young man goes to find her and bring her back.
And begins to build a reputation.
Quite by accident, he disrupts a stage hold-up right in the middle of a town, learning then of his abilities with a pistol, a good eye without any training, dispatching two of the robbers when he snatches a gun out of the air when the driver is killed, then later killing the two leaders, brothers, when they come after him. He gets the name Resquiescant because he makes the sign of the the cross and prays over every kill.
In the town where he finds the girl, Princy(Barbara Frey), she’s working as a prostitute, held prisoner by a man named Dean Light(Ferruccio Viotti). Requiescant goes to the big boss, George Ferguson(Mark Damon), who agrees to let the girl go. Though they never say it, an undercurrent surrounds Ferguson and Dean Light. One gets the distinct impression that Ferguson is a homosexual. He has a singular disdain for women, marrying only to get an heir, and has an affection for Light that goes beyond friendship. He even promises Light that “one day all this will be yours.”
Things are never as easy as they seem. Light doesn’t want his moneymaker to leave and tries to have our hero killed, costing Ferguson three of his men.
Requiescant, with the help of an old Mexican mute who recognizes the scar on his head and knows who he is starts to remember the slaughter when he was a child. And also that Ferguson was the officer in charge that day.
That’s when all hell breaks loose. An old priest recruits him and helps bring down the murderers. Our hero plays a deadly game with Dean Light called Hangman’s Noose. Each man stands on a stool with a noose around his neck. At the stroke og midnight, they draw and try to shoot the stool from under the other man.
A much better film than I expected. Directed by Carlo Lizzani, the list of writers involved runs to eleven. Usually a bad sign. Not in this case though.
The title character is a small mechanical toy, the only thing our hero finds in the ruins of his home when he comes home from the war, a Union officer(Ty Hardin who we know only as the Stranger), finding the home burned to the ground. His wife and son had been murdered. A lot of the film is flashbacks, from The Stranger’s point of view as well as some of the villains.
on the ground, and saying “When it stops, make your move!”
Sun(Rossano Brazzi), aids The Stranger.
![3 colpi di Winchester per Ringo [aka 3 Bullets for Ringo] (1966)_03](https://randall120.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/3-colpi-di-winchester-per-ringo-aka-3-bullets-for-ringo-1966_03.jpg)
Not The Baseball Pitcher 