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Dec 16, 2023

'Blood Money: Four Western Classics' Blu

This set is another rewarding trek into less-traveled genre terrain from Arrow Video. Ask most cinephiles about the spaghetti western and Sergio Leone’s name will most likely be invoked. As for those

This set is another rewarding trek into less-traveled genre terrain from Arrow Video.

Ask most cinephiles about the spaghetti western and Sergio Leone’s name will most likely be invoked. As for those who’ve delved a little deeper into the genre, chances are that they’ll name-drop one or both of the other Sergios: Sergio Corbucci (Django) and Sergio Sollima (The Big Gundown).

Back in 2021, Arrow Video’s Vengeance Trails box set aimed to broaden viewers’ horizons of the spaghetti western by spotlighting works by directors like Lucio Fulci, Massimo Dallamano, and Antonio Margheriti, whose names are more often associated with other genres. Now along comes Blood Money, which unveils several lesser-known yet excellent examples of the genre. The thematic through line this time out concerns the value placed on human life. As the grizzled protagonist of Find a Place to Die puts it: “Madness and greed were in men’s hearts a long time before you came along.”

Romolo Guerrieri’s $10,000 Blood Money and Giovanni Fago’s Vengeance Is Mine, both from 1967, are essentially companion pieces. Indeed, both share producers Mino Loy and Luciano Martino, screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, cinematographer Federico Zanni, and composer Nora Orlandi, not to mention lead actors Gianni Garko and Claudio Camaso.

In $10,000 Blood Money, bounty hunter Django (Garko) only agrees to track down bandido Manuel Vasquez (Camaso) once the reward money hits the titular sum. Along with the name of its protagonist, the film shares its lead actress, Lorena Nusciak, with the aforementioned Corbucci classic. Here she plays Mijanou, the Frenchified saloon operator and Django’s love interest. In one of the film’s most surprising developments, Django discovers Mijanou’s dead body among the victims of a stagecoach robbery. Even though the narrative has mentioned her planned departure, the way the scene unfolds, with the camera panning across the corpses until it stops on a closeup on her staring eyes and open mouth, still comes as a real jolt.

Vengeance Is Mine features Garko and Camaso as half-brothers Johnny and Clint Forest. In a series of dreamy slow-motion flashbacks, we learn that Clint murdered their father out of jealousy and impotent rage over his preferential treatment of Johnny, then framed him for the crime. Out of prison after 10 long years, Johnny is forced to make a living as a bounty hunter, when he discovers that there’s a reward out for his brother’s arrest.

Both of these films play out the same narrative arc, leading to the inevitable showdown between wrongdoer and avenger. But each throws the plot a curveball by introducing a third party as the heavy who has to be dispatched before the climactic shootout can proceed: In the former, Fernando Sancho plays Manuel’s devious father, Stardust, with gleeful abandon, while Piero Lulli scowls his way through the role of gang leader Jurago in the latter.

All four of the films included in Blood Money share a fascination with torture. In $10,000 Blood Money, Stardust Vasquez’s men bury Django up to his neck in the scorching desert sands, then turn a deadly scorpion loose on him. Halfway through Vengeance Is Mine, Jurago’s henchmen dangle Johnny Forest upside-down from a gibbet and bash him around a bit.

Giuliano Carnimeo’s Find a Place to Die, from 1968, doubles down on such sadistic imagery by including both scorpions and inverted hangings, even adding the notion of using an open flame to extract information from a recalcitrant informer. For its part, Cesare Canevari’s 1970 acid spaghetti western Matalo! comes down on the masochistic end of the sadomasochistic spectrum, spotlighted in a prolonged torture by gold-encrusted chain sequence, ending on a shot that clearly depicts the victim’s borderline ecstatic response.

Effectively a remake of Henry Hathaway’s 1954 CinemaScope western Garden of Evil, Carnimeo’s rousing Find a Place to Die is notable as a canny exercise in location shooting, finding adroit narrative means to reuse three sites within a day’s travel from Rome (at the time, many contemporaries spaghetti westerns largely filmed on location in Almería, Spain). Even more extraordinary is the way that it enlarges upon, and renders more complex, the roles played by its female leads, which is quite unusual for the genre, where actresses are most often consigned to play either barroom floozies or East Coast citified schoolmarm types.

Lisa Martin (Pascale Petit) recruits five men, led by grizzled Civil War deserter Joe Collins (Jeffrey Hunter), to rescue her prospector husband, Paul (Piero Lulli again), who, following a landslide during a faceoff with a gang of bandits led by Chato (Mario Dardanelli), is now trapped in a goldmine. What follows is a taut series of action set pieces, peppered with double- and triple-crosses, and excitingly staged by Carnimeo. So it’s ironic that the director chooses to keep the “money shot,” the outcome of the final shootout, entirely off screen. The film is also notable because it was filmed not only on location but almost entirely outdoors, so the film’s palette is dominated by the lush greens of the foliage and the yellow glare of the sun.

Easily the best film in this set, Matalo! is a sight to behold, with its frenetically roving camera, crazily canted angles, and ever more eerie ambiance, not to mention a primordially molten psych rock score from composer Mario Migliardi. Among its confreres, Matalo! is equaled in its unabashed urge to disorient audiences and thwart their expectations only by Giulio Questi’s dementedly surreal Django Kill…If You Live, Shoot! Both of these titles get a lot of mileage out of their exclamatory titles, which certainly set the stage for the hyperbolic antics they offer.

Structurally, Matalo! is something of an odd duck as well. Its nominal hero, Ray (Lou Castel), doesn’t even show up until halfway through the film. Until then, we settle in and get to know its charmingly theatrical baddie, Burt (Corrado Pani), and his gang. He’s accompanied by taciturn Ted (Antonio Salines); Burt’s discontented second fiddle, Phil (Luis Dávila); and Phil’s calculating girlfriend, Mary (Claudia Gravy), who takes a far more active part in the eventually bloody proceedings than the viewer might initially suspect.

Throughout, Canevari brazenly blends genre modes, liberally ladling dollops of gothic horror into the film’s increasingly strange brew. Matalo! mostly takes place in a ghost town, where an unseen figure stalks Burt and the gang, and sometimes tries to throw a wrench into the proceedings, doing little things like setting the place on fire. There’s a squeaky, self-motivated child’s swing right out of Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby…Kill! A lengthy torture sequence featuring the swing and the blade of a large hunting knife even pays homage to the razor-edged menace of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (in any of its myriad adaptations).

Matalo! is also uncommon in its choice of weaponry for its leading man. Being the son of a preacher man, Ray eschews firearms, instead sporting a pouch full of boomerangs. During Ray’s showdown with Ted, Canevari delights in shooting from the boomerang’s POV, with the camera swooping and swirling around the dusty, abandoned streets of Benson City. Though Ray manages to take Ted out with about 10 blows by boomerang, much of the third act carnage is down to the three-way battle between Burt, Mary, and the stalker, who turns out to be town matriarch Constance Benson (Ana María Noé). The final battle for Ray’s soul pits property owner Benson versus fiscal opportunist Burt. Fittingly, Matalo! concludes by giving Ray a third option: pull up stakes. Matalo! represents the high-water mark in a set that just gets better and better with each film. Here’s hoping we’ll ride up on a third volume somewhere down the pike.

The set’s four films are presented in fresh 2K scans made from the original 35mm camera negatives. The results look superb, exhibiting vivid colors, deep blacks, lifelike flesh tones, and well-tended grain levels. Damage is practically nonexistent, aside from some speckling here and there. Each film comes with Italian and English LPCM mono audio tracks (along with language-specific opening and closing credits). There’s a proviso on Vengeance Is Mine that warns about a difference in pitch between the audio options, but it’s not overly problematic. Each language gives off its own distinct vibe (with the English tracks generally coming across as more amusingly colloquial), but either mix nicely puts across the atmospheric scores by Nora Orlandi and Gianni Ferrio, as well as Mario Migliardi’s outrageous acid rock contributions to Matalo!

Inside the box, there’s a double-sided fold-out poster with new artwork by Gilles Vranckx (who also designed the slipcase), and a copiously illustrated booklet with extensive liner notes by author and critic Howard Hughes. Each film comes with a new introduction by journalist and critic Fabio Metelli, and an informative commentary track from Lee Broughton, Adrian J. Smith and David Flint, Howard Hughes, and Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson, respectively. Broughton’s track dwells extensively on the play of repetition and difference within the spaghetti western genre, while the others tend to be more oriented toward production history, contributor bios, and prevalent themes and motifs among the films. There are excellent new interviews with producer Mino Loy and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, as well as archival interviews with composer Nora Orlandi, actor Gianni Garko, and directors Romolo Guerrieri and Giulio Carnimeo. Lastly, there are two terrific, in-depth assessments of composers Gianni Ferrio and Mario Migliardi from musician and soundtrack collector Lovely Jon.

Blood Money: Four Classic Westerns is another rewarding trek into less-traveled genre terrain from Arrow Video, sporting gorgeous transfers and loads of special features.

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Budd Wilkins's writing has appeared in Film Journal International and Video Watchdog. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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