A dark stormy
night, a small family ranch is attacked by raiders who rape and murder
the family and leave no-one alive... except one young boy. 15 years
later, Bill Meceita (John Phillip Law) has trained himself to
become an expert marksman but still has no idea who was responsible for
the murders. Meanwhile Ryan (Lee Van Cleef), a former member of the
gang, is being released from a state prision where he has served 15
years after being betrayed by the gang. Both men want revenge on the
gang members, but Ryan is more interested in money while Bill plans
death for all those involved. Seeing in Bill a useful but dangerous
ally, Ryan lures him into the desert and takes his horse, heading on to
Holly Springs where former gang member Burt Cavanaugh (Anthony
Dawson) lives. Ryan insists on Cavanaugh paying him $15,000 for
the time he spent in prision, but when Bill arrives he quickly
confronts and kills Cavanaugh in a duel, before Ryan can get paid.
Taking
Bill's horse, Ryan heads on to Lyndon City where another former gang
member, Walcott (Luigi Pistilli), is now a banker. Now demanding
$30,000, Ryan falls into a trap and needs Bill to help
him. Walcott
is in the middle of an elaborate plan himself to liberate the town of a
million dollars, and with it in tow, he heads south to Mexico to meet
up with other members of the gang, but they have Ryan and Bill tracking
them all the way...
The
storyline is your basic 'man out to get revenge on those who killed my
father/brother/family' story that you get in almost every Western,
Spaghetti or otherwise, fortunately, there are plenty of original
aspects to the story to make it interesting. Ryan is a very curious
character and his motives in regards to Bill are rather vague, and
although Bill is a perfect shot he is not experienced and Ryan
frequently
gets the upper hand on him, while Ryan himself is not beyond making
mistakes. After the death of the first gang member,
you expect the film to follow a similar pattern to Death Sentence
(1967) and its kin, with Bill/Ryan tracking down the members individually - but after
Walcott gets the better of them, the pattern changes as they head to
Mexico where Walcott's gang is waiting. The film's pacing is very slow,
much more in the style of an American Western - it takes 45 minutes
before the first proper duel, and the film keeps gratuitous
gunfights to a minimum, but it never seems to drag and we get a
lot more detail of Bill's investigations that in most similar films.
Little known director Giulio Petroni, coupled with cinematographer Carl Carlini (The Big Gundown (1966)), does a very good job here and the film boasts strong camerawork throughout. Bill's poker-table duel with Cavanaugh
is a stand-out sequence and one of the best duels I have ever seen in a
Spaghetti Western. The film is bolstered by an impressive orchestral
and choral soundtrack from Ennio Morricone that ranges from traditional
Western to dischordant jazz and even contains some hints of his
future soundtrack to
The Thing (1982).
Lee Van Cleef was a Euro-Western veteran by this point, appearing in two Leone films and Sollima's
The Big Gundown (1966), he fits his role perfectly, almost a continuation of his Colonel Mortimer character from
Fistful of Dollars (1965) - and would go on to play a similarly wily anti-hero in
Sabata
(1969). John Phillip Law makes his only Spaghetti Western appearance
here and looks wooden and poor - Law is best known for his
ultra-suave
Diabolik
(1968)
character, a role for which he had to do mostly physical work and
little actual acting, and although his gunwork is very
impressive, he is sadly required to 'emote' here as well and
completely fails. He does suit the 'novice gunfighter' character in a
way that genre favourites like Tomas Milian or Franco Nero would not
have been able to, but actors like Peter Lee Lawrence were more
sucessful, and would have looked a lot better here. The rest of the
cast is a standard mix of Euro-cult
and western actors, including Anthony Dawson (the evil Spanish count in
Curse of the Werewolf (1961)), Luigi Pistilli (
The Great Silence (1969)) and José Torres (Ramirez the poet in
Run, Man, Run (1968)).
Although not the most original film in the genre,
Death Rides a Horse
is well written and impressively directed with a powerful Ennio
Morricone score, only John Phillip Law's wooden acting damages the
film, but he is countered out by a nice smooth performance from Van
Cleef. One of the genre's best, it comes recommended to fans of the slower, more detailed Euro-Westerns,
and a good place for American Western fans to sample the quality of the
Spaghetti Westerns.
