Episode 812: Cut-Throats Nine (1972)

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Put it off. Cutthroats nine, nineteen seventy two. A cavalry escort hauls a wagonload of convicts chained together from a gold mine towards a distant fort. They're ambushed by bandits looking for gold. We haven't gotten to go, buddy, but.

There is no gold. The wagon's destroyed, no horses are gone. Now the sergeant, his daughter, and the convicts are stranded in a deadly winter wilderness. But things are never that simple. The sergeant has other plans the murderers.

And the convicts. They'll discover the chains may not be what they think they are. This film is bleak with a capital B and nihilistic with a capital holy. They even handed out terror masks at the screening to hide your eyes if you dare no rating nine terror masks out of nine The Saintra Grandpa's Western. Welcome to the projection booth.

I'm your host, Mike White Jimney. Once again is Professor Nick Schlegel. Good to be with you, Mike. Also back in the booth is Miss Heather Drain. Hello.

Hello. We are wrapping up a month talking about Westerns with one from nineteen seventy two, Cutthroats nine. Directed by Joaching Romero Marshent and written by him and Santiago Moncata. The film tells the tale of Sergeant Brown, who escorted seven conflicts through the mountains on their way to be executed. That's only eight people, you say, Don't worry.

Brown's daughter Kathy is also there for the trip. Through the actions of the men and their flashbacks, we learn that this is not a simple death march. We will be spoiling this film as we go along, so if you don't want anything ruined. Turn off the podcast and come back after you've seen this movie. We will still be here.

So, Heather, when was the first time you saw Cutthroats nine? And what did you think? Ma'am? The first time I saw it was preparing for this podcast. This was a film I had heard of for years.

It's an infamous one, especially with its roots and playing a lot of American grindhouses. Effective You can go on YouTube right now and find a really great grindhouse era trailer for it that promotes it having some kind of what was it, like the terror bag or something like that, like some kind of carny type of marketing, which I of course love. So when it came up to do this episode, I was like, yes, this gives me excuse and to watch it. And boy, howdy, this was such a great film. It did not disappoint, which given the kind of amountain of sort of infamy attached to it, is impressive because sometimes you can go into these things blind and be disappointed or like, oh, that's it okay, and Nick, how about yourself?

I distinctly remember reading the title sometime in the late nineties or maybe early two thousands and a Barnes and Noble. I think I was just picked up a spaghetti western book encyclopedia type thing, and was just it was in the C section, and so I was like, I just page landed on it, and the title struck me, and I read a brief entry about it and kind of just filed it away and never I don't recall it being available at all back then, or perhaps if it was, I didn't seek it out. But then doing a lot of research on Spain and writing that that that book on Spanish horror films, it was just a title that kept coming up when I was researching the Destape and the spaghetti and piea Westerns, and of course the Spanish horror films.

It just was a name that kept coming up. And of course there's a there's like a pedigree of actors in here that are have done not only a lot of Westerns, but there's a lot of stalwart character actors that populated the horror films too, particularly Alberto Dalles, who's really pretty slick in this, I think, and he has that wonderful role in Hunchback of the Morgue as the scientist doctor doctor Acula. It's not doctor Orlov, but it's doctor of something similar to that. He's really good in that. Once I kind of came across the name over and over, then Yeah, it just seemed like a natural selection for us to tackle.

A year later here, I'm really glad we made that sort of pinky square. I don't remember how I came across this film the first time. I want to say I saw it in a video store. I don't know if they would have carried this at Blockbuster, but they carried some weird shit that they probably would have eventually found out that there are bad things in it and taken it off the shelf. Blood Feast or City of the Living Dead.

They were so weird when it came to what they took off the shelves. I mostly just remember that VHS box cover with the guy being strangled, and I almost thought it was Joe Spinell who's on the video box cover. Same, Oh my god, it's one hundred percent. So I took the point where I had a Mandela effect memory going into this movie because my husband was like, are you guys gonna be doing us a cut throa? It's fine?

And I'm like, I think Joe Spinelson. I'm glad I'm not the only one, and especially you saying that really validates me because I know what a big Joe Spinel fan you are. I love him so much. That makes the film's still good. It's still good even though Joe's not in it.

But there are some great faces in here. I have to say that the guy who plays the arsonist, Antonio Auronzo, He's fantastic. I love his face. He's just such a character with that. And yeah, I had heard about this, especially after things like The Hateful Eight.

Obviously this is a play on that was a play on this title. I had heard for years that Tarantino wanted to remake this film. This was one of those films that you would read about, Oh yeah, he wants to do Faster pussy Cat, Kill Kill, he wants to do Cutthroats nine. And I knew that he had tipped the hat to The Great Silence swhich is another snowbound Western, but this one is it's so guaranty you now. You can just see so much how he took from this.

This is an unusual one, though I don't recall too many westerns or spaghetti westerns that have voiceover narration, and I am curious if that was all in the original Spanish version. It seems like it had to be, just because of the way that it's being filmed at the beginning, with one of the criminals going around the entire group in the back of the wagon that is transporting them and telling you little bits about each one of these convicts. It reminded me of another film from nineteen seventy one seventy two, but much larger budget, bigger stars, which is Big Jake. I don't know if you guys ever saw a Big Jake, but John Wayne film. And in the beginning, it's an assault on a ranch being led by Richard Boone, and it's got this Elmer Bernstein's score going, and they have these lingering close ups on all these people on horseback and rape, murder, kidnapping, like it's going through the list.

He said, yeah, exactly. It's a lot of raven When I was watching it, I immediately thought of that, and I thought interesting, they came out same year ish and they have this sort of similar intro, which then you link also to Tarantino, that sort of like classic sort of like intro segment. It's really stylish doing it and a carriage. Though that's too cool. It doesn't keep up with the voiceover.

The voiceover is almost literally just and it feels like an intro thing and we get a little bit of it, but then it just it gets dropped for a few reasons the introduction. I love all the names. Some of these criminals have some really fantastic names, like Dandy Jim, I believe Ray, who's the actor. Yeah, boy, there are some great mugs in this film. I think isn't his signame like the torch because he as arson on that.

One of them's the weasel, who's really despicable. Real life weasels are adorable. The animals are so cute, so this guy's not so much. So you get that kind of colorful, but that's really the only colorful we're going to really get. This film is so gritty and so brutal, and also huge paths of quiet.

It's almost like the film itself's pacing matches the landscape because we have these so many of these really great shots of these of the great which I think isn't in the Juesca. Oh god, my Spanish is like a hate crime. And I don't mean it to pay, But these great snowy mountains, and it's just huge, the vastness, the beauty, but also just the just nature is beautiful, but it is brutal. And we have these very very brutal human beings along with Sergeant Brown, who's in charge of this chain gangs, and his poor daughter Kathy. My god, why when the world, when anybody bring she has an adult at least it's not like she's just eight or something.

But in this era especially, but any era, why would you bring your lovely late teens daughter to be alone in the snowy European mountains technico or US wink? Yeah, obviously these are the Rockies, right, yeah, probably not. The period the chain gang that has rapists, but why would you? But then the more I thought about it's like Brown. The film Like an Onion reveals little bits more and more about the each character, and with Brown, we realize one of these guys he suspects, murdered his wife Kathy's bomb, and there's a purpose.

And then we have a double purpose. I don't know if we want to go into that quite yet, but we might as well. Right, the chain is gold. You don't find it, said almost midway through the but then it's oh, and even Kathy's looking at her dad like is this true? What of you?

What are you doing? And because he's using these men to basically ferret this gold to Fort Green so he can have it and also kill two birds of one stone, one of them is the murderer, but he doesn't even know which one's the killer. Nobody knows which one is the killer. There are two men that definitely know, because one of them is the killer and the other one was with them, but we don't find that out till the very end. Yeah.

I just love the way that this story is told. The whole idea of the voiceover is one thing, and then the flashbacks and again like flashbacks totally normal during the Spaghetti Western. I think about all the great flashbacks and for a few dollars more and how they really help tell the story. We were just talking a few weeks ago about the Wild Bunch and some of the use of the flashbacks, and they're that absolutely bizarre one with Bo Hopkins where it's like, oh, yeah, my nephew, and then they have to show Bo Hopkins. But here I was just taken aback because it happens really early on.

At one point, one of the convicts is talking about going life after death and he's like, oh, yeah, your whole life passes in front of your eyes, and like, how do you know that? He's like, oh, I had the hangmans of rope around my neck at one point, and they like do this really quick freeze frame and then cut to him with the rope around his neck, and then really right around, like twelve minutes into this thing, you get another freeze frame and then you start to see Sergeant Brown and I guess it's his wife and just this kind of idyllic past that they had, and you get slow motion and all this kind of stuff, and that idea of the flashbacks just continues on through the film and you never know when they're going to happen, and it always takes me back a little bit where it's just, oh, why did the film just stop?

And that's oh, okay, here comes a flashback, because there's almost like a beat too long between the freeze frame and then the flashback starting. And I like that, and I like that this narrative is not told in any sort of conventional way and really becomes nick You mentioned horror and how this would come up during horror discussions because there's horror elements to it, there's a mystery to it, there's a Western element of it, but just all of these things coming together, it's like this mish master genre. We were all talking about the brilliant casting of the film, and the genre, particularly the spaghetti version of the genre, loves to linger in these close ups on these unique faces, where every scar, every wrinkled has a great story behind it.

But what I noticed during the film, and this is no small measure, but it comes from someone who's well beyond a journeyman as a director of westerns, is and his cinematographer is the idea that the forest and the branches and the foliage and the mountains and the snow are all extremely busy in the composition. So they're constantly using very shallow focus, real shallow depth of field to keep us right on there, because if we had a bigger depth of field, it would the composition would be so messy, we wouldn't know where it would just because every single shot has got harsh angles of trees and bare branches and things like that. So as I watched it, I just made a notation that the editing of the close ups.

The shooting of the close ups and the editing of the closeups were experts just really handled beautifully as well camera movement. And then Mike, what you were saying is, yeah, the film is it is a hodgepodge of a lot of different elements that come together, and I don't know, it seemed really cohesive in a weird way. To me. You wouldn't necessarily expect them to all gel, but they really do. And the device of the flashback isn't really a cheat at all.

It's not this is lazy storytelling. They're all fragmented backstories that you try to piece together, and I'm not sure I ever really successfully did them all, and I'm sure that you can't. Right, there's not an actual some of them. Yeah, some of them know. It's weird, right, It's hard to keep track of exactly how they relate to one and other flashbacks because they don't in many instances.

And also the editing, like you bring up how they edited the flashbacks, and to me it almost felt like a really cool, if this makes any sense, like a counter cultural edit, because that type of editing, to me, feels very indicative. The way it's done here, of some of the more almost experimental narrative films that you would see from the late sixties and early seventies, where filmmakers were really trying more out of the box tactics and techniques and taking kind of that influence from just the spirit of the age of let's do something different, let's do something in a visual way that's not like our father's kind of element. But that technique gives this film like a fragmented poet poetry kind of vibe.

This film has such a strange heart to it because it does have such a somberness about it and a care about it well, being completely raw honest about this era. These are yeah, these are convicts and one man who is basically doing kind of convict behavior. But this is also a heart scrabble time where people good people are perfectly morally good or having to do a lot of time things they don't want to do because it's survival, and where everybody trips up as the greed, which I mean, god, that's something like that's a trope. At this point with Western's Treasures, the r Madre were crying out loud. But the way it's done here, I just thought it was so compelling, and there is just so many great God Nick to your point, there is just so many like big wide shots and then just tight like almost not quite clusterphobic, but we're getting their close ups, and it just gives you this great sort of disjointed feeling in a way that works because it's it makes you feel like how these people had to have felt.

I can't even imagine. One of the very first things I wrote down was must have been a ruling shoot. Yeah, oh God, good night? Well yeah, yeah, to shoot this in these mountains, and the stunt at the beginning, maybe it was a stunt, maybe it wasn't. But the horses and the carriage going down the side of the hill.

Oh, I don't want to think about what happened to those horses. Those actors earned every penny. Yeah, And just to set this in the mountains, and to use these mountains so much in the framing, especially near the beginning when they don't have a carriage anymore and now they have to go on foot across these mountains. The mountains are so big, so majestic, and just look like they are gods looking down on these people, just laughing at them and their futility and just to see their struggle. The one guy has to carry because somebody was injured in the carriage falling down.

So there's one guy who's injured. So they're like, Okay, I don't want to carry him, you have to carry him, and just carrying this poor guy across here, and they're just like, man, if this guy was dead, it'd be so much easier. And they really aren't the kind of people who are filled with empathy because these are seven convicts carrying this poor guy, and yeah, he doesn't come to a very good end. And that's when we have the other part, which I don't know if you would necessarily call it a genre, but definitely has elements of grindhouse like you said before, where that you start to get some of these great skulls with eyeballs popping out and just this kind of like real gritty kind of stuff where you're.

Like looking for you, like with Daria or Agento second Ac on this or something. I legit. It was like I know this is Spanish, so I know, fol she's not technically involved in this. It was very it was like, goddamn, okay movie it It's like I'm like it is not. They are not pulling any punches here, and it's but it's interesting the way it's mixed, because most of the gore I think is integrated really well.

I know it seems I know some of it was shot after the fact, but it doesn't look it looks seamless. I have seen there's a version of the Creature from the Blue with the Blue Hand, like the German Creamy that was re released as The Bloody did with some nineteen eighties shot on video gore effects. It edited in this nineteen sixties movie, and it is. It makes you feel like you're on trucks. I mean honest, it makes you feel insane, You're like white what either.

It reminds me of sexy genes, that version of Massacre at Central High where it's like oh and then suddenly they're having sex and it's like whoa, whoa, this doesn't make sense. How unhinged. Massacre at Central High is what the most I love that movie is brilliant. It is not sexy. There is no sexy geens our jeans, they are not sexy.

Burger were retitled it sexy and put in badly shot hardcore porno with actors they didn't even try to mash them, and they just found some randoms. They were like, hey, you guys are making out over there can be film you. It just found that viobent. So yes, cuth Throat Tonight is not that's oh my god, it's sexy. And I think the other thing that adds to this grindhouse feel is just how beat up this print looks.

Nick messaged me earlier this week, He's like, is there a better printed this? I'm like, this is the best one I can find, And yeah, it looks okay. I think it was the code read version that they put out, which was an improvement on earlier versions, but it still just looks beat the shit a lot of times. And yet that that just seemed to add to the choice. Yeah, like you said, the it lent it that grindhouse aesthetic, and yeah, the color palette in it, and the way that the whole thing is blocked a camera and shot in sort of conjunction with the landscape is just pretty mind blowing cinematography.

Earlier, Heather mentioned you used the word poetic, and I thought to myself, yes, this is very bleak poetry is with what we're nearing. It kind of starts off. You're not really sure exactly what to make of what's going on, and who do we trust. We have these these flashbacks, we have these this opening narration and voiceover golds at the heart of it. It's at the heart of so many these narratives, and then it just takes all these these really twists and turns that I wasn't anticipating, despite or in or because of its reputation.

I had read a lot about it, and so the threshold for me to be disturbed in this was pretty and I still was disturbed, but in really filling way that is. Highly accurate of this film as an experience. And it's one of those two where there's so many films that were called grindhouse that if you really watch the isolated without any context, it's like, this is art this is art house. It just wasn't promoted like at art house. It didn't have maybe art house critical acclaim, it didn't have art house sort of prestige, cachet, sometimes money, and so these films sometimes get overlooked a little bit as solid films, as great films.

This one's a great example of that. There's the moral just decay of it all is so fascinating, and especially because they're smart enough to put some gradient in there. It's not just God, if you watch the trailer again, that Grindhouse trailer, it looks even rapier than the movie. It's like it is on h It's like that what you're talking about? What was it?

Big Ja, big Jake, Big Jake, Yes, big Jake, and yeah it's rape Burner right yeah, and it's like whoa, Okay, compounds there. But this film, like it's like it has enough brutality where it knows not to be like, you know what, if we take it too far, you're just gonna be overwhelmed. It's almost like mixing in the subtle with the extreme. It's like a great contrast. Some of the most disturbing films I've ever seen are really smarted doing that.

And we think about how Texas Chainsaw impacts people. And that film has lots of quiet moments and it messes with your mind. You think you've seen more than you have. Same with Henry Catharine. To Night will have those big, brief, gory kind of bits, but then it's like just tension.

The snow snow, Yeah, tons of tension. Cutting into the next cutting the next, cutting into the next, moving it forward, even through some long sequences that are basically silent, just carried by the sound design, and that that fantastic score. No very repetitive score though too. Yeah you can trigger, but so yeah. Some of the other light like when they take the the Mike Darling Clementine which they're singing, and then after that scene it goes from diegetic taunting of Sergeant Brown by changing the lyrics, and then in the next scene it's orchestral but it's in a minor key, which is really cool and so much just like that I think are pretty pretty dark one impressive in this film.

It really elevates it way above what average run of the mill spaghetti western or your sort of like bottom grade spaghetti western. This one, I'm sure is in a lot of top twenty or thirty lists. It has to be. They're very smart too. I don't want to keep bringing up Tarantino, but this whole idea of these men who are together with this woman in the snow and nobody trusts anybody.

There's a reason why there was so much more cone and the unused score, the unuxed cues for the thing when it came to The Hateful Eight. That movie is basically a remake or an updating of the thing, and this one felt like it too. Just these guys in the snow can't trust each other, and who knows who's the murderer? Who knows who's going to do what. That's the only thing I really liked about The Hateful Eight.

I still never understood why they were doing a seventy millimeter presentation of a movie that ninety percent of it takes place indoors. Seems a little wasteful, whereas this one, it feels like every penny that they spent is on the screen, even though, like I said, it's beat to shit. The colors are so muted. There's probably we'll never see a better version of this than we are now, but it looks fucking fantastic. I feel like sometimes with major, big Hollywood movies where people put pumping in that much money, it almost to me just feels like a really obscene size measuring contest.

But if you have vision, if you have enough technique and ideas and excitement, you don't need that much money. I've seen shot on video movies that were made for five hundred bucks that had some shots that blew me away, and I've seen films that cost twenty million dollars that bored me to absolute tears. So you just need vision and some people that know what they're doing and are having fun doing it and are excited about trying new things. Yeah, I've never seen The Hateful Eight, and it's it doesn't need me. I'm not trying to be a hater.

It just I'm good. I'd rather watch Code an cut nine. And the thing too, is like how authentic these criminals felt too. Nobody really felt like a stereotype, which was nice. It's another kind of beauty I think where you you find that more in European film westerns than some of it's Americans at all.

There's exceptions to everything, but where they all just legit, like and you're talking about the actor that plays Ray in particular, having a great face mic and yeah, like there are times where it's like his eyes are just burning. You're like, this, what is this guy? I do not like what's going on in his head? But a lot of the guys just have these way of just looking around and it's exciting and terrifying because you know it's not who when are they gonna or if it's no, these guys are going to turning on each other real quick. And you're instantly worried for Kathy.

You're worried for Brown a little bit, but Joe. Most are more upset with him because it's like, why did you, dude, why did you bring your daughter? Like? Why? And again, I don't think that's at a fault of the film.

That's a flaw of the man. That's a flaw of the character because he cannot see the tree from the skies at this point in his life. He's grieving, he's greedy. You've got two very, very painful and emotions that can grow cancer. It's really quick dealing with that, so you get it.

But you're still this poor girl, this poor lamb, and she's such a that's such a great performance. Emma Cohen, I realie. She does so much with her eyes. She's mute throughout most of the movie. She's not a mute, she just keeps to herself because that's honestly, she's smart.

If I was her, I think if a lot of us were heard, you know what, the less we say around these many asks, the less of a target you put on yourself. The better. I love that she had that kind of innate intelligence. It would have been really too easy to make her a complete I don't know, just oh like this doe ide it. Seems messing or somebody to rate.

She's so integral to everything in the film. Right to the end. It felt like an honest and an honest strength that wasn't just like everybody's a badass, which we have in some and a lot of Western films where it's like they all eight of these guys would be like fighting people left and right and have the strength of a thousand men, and instead in this film, it's more realistic. For now, these guys are probably malnourished at this point, you. Know, that becomes like a major thing where they're like, we can't find food.

I think that's one of the most disturbing shots for me in the movie is when somebody offscreen hucks a deer kirkiss into the frame and it just slides across the snow and it's like, what the hell was that. I'm like, Oh, they're hunting, okay, And then you get the scene of them eating, and that's when the one guy's like beating the chain with the rock and they discover that it's gold. That's the end of the first act kind of break. I think it's thirty minutes in. And then later on in the movie they're just like, we got to find another deer because yeah, here we are on the mountain in winter.

There's not a lot of animals up here for us to eat. They have lust in their hearts and hunger in their bellies. That's the byeline. Oh my god, except Ray who just immediately goes for all the booze and then gets the DTAs ly. Maybe feel bad for him because I'm like, and I say, this is somebody who's been sober almost four years now.

If I was somebody out in that sobriety would be very hard thing to stick to in that situation. Like I just saw some dude's eyes, Oh god, yeah, pop out of his face. You know what, I don't think this is the lifetime for me to be suffer. No, and to go back what you're saying before. As far as the integration of the gore, the first time you see a real gory body, when they dispatch of the guy who was injured and first they strangle him, you get that straw pulling flashback of I guess who's going to kill this guy?

Maybe yeah, I'm not exactly clear on that. But then you get him being choked to death, and then you get the whole thing of them carrying this dead body in them as we need to dispose of this guy, and they set him on fire and he's just this burnt corpse, and her reaction to it, it's this doesn't look like it was shot. Later it looks like if she wasn't reacting to that, she was reacting to something pretty horrific. And then with every single person, you can't just leave the body because they are all chained together, so you always have to have the cutting off of the feet. Which is so gross.

And Sergeant Brown boy, he's pretty stern task, just an. Yeah, trying to break out the mache. Finally the machete comes out. Yeah, but that's the thing you think about how nasty the wild West it had to have been. Bathing is not very common.

It's a lot of soap is a luxury, definitely in this universe and the Cutthroat nine universe, because we don't see any people are just trying to live, they're trying to eat, they're trying to survive. We see Ray literally go to the bathroom and his pants and the wagon in the intro, like this is in that little smug look. He's like a oh god, is he a shitter kid? I know he's like an adult, but he's act it like a Stephen King little shitter kid with that little smug, like all right, and everybody's laughing. I'm like, why are you guys laughing?

This guy just did I hope what was number one? And that plays into the whole firebug thing, right, don't they say that most arts in this what their beds for way too long. I didn't even think about that. Oh my god. Oh I don't know if that was intentional or not, but that's what I was getting out of there.

And then yeah, his little command. Followed all of those guys, say, for maybe Dean, who we haven't really mentioned yet, but Dean is of the convexts of our criminals. Dean is the morally nicest seeming He's not. He seemed quiet, I think even in the narration in the intro, Sergeant Brown says, nobody really knows what this guy did, but he's convicted for life, which is interesting and it makes you think Dean's an innocent man, which God knows I should sadly have still happens now, so it's possible. Of course, we find out more later.

We'll get to that just yet. But Dean did it? Was it just me? Dean looks so much like David Keith to me? Oh yeah, sure, So I kept being like, nine's really handsome, and then I'm like, he looks like David Keith.

That's what I love, David Keith. But yeah, yeah, and the active place seems great. And you because you do Dean, but you're also really curious because he at times keeps to himself too. He and again it's like smart, especially with Ray and the Weasel and Dandy Devom was a Jim Dandy good lord. Yeah, there's an alternate kind of this starring Jim Dandy from Black Oak, ar Kansas Bandoned thirty Countries Dandy Jim, and he's kind of the leader.

It feels like he ends up asserting himself as the leader of the group. And he, to me is interesting because he tends to play play it half smart and half like. He makes some steps because of the greed. That's fair. Yeah, he definitely comes across as the most cultured or intelligent.

Certainly his backstory suggests some of that as well via the flashbacks, and he seems to keep some sort of emotional distance from everybody. And again it's El Alberto Dalbis who plays that role, and I think he's he really, he's one of the shining aspects of the film for me. He's just especially those flashbacks. Is he the guy who's there with the woman at the piano and the cavin candelabra. Yes, exactly, Okay, yeah, yeah, I can totally see what you means.

Yeah. I was having a hard time keeping all the names straight other than el Common Chero and stuff. But yeah, yeah, no, I really like that. And it's interesting too when you think about this whole murder mystery thing, because eventually Sergeant Brown passes away and it's okay. Yeah, I like to have waypoint huh.

What forty five minutes into it, I think, and yeah, becomes another burnt up corpseite you get and then you get that you're talking about the DT scene. I absolutely loved when Ray comes back to that cabin that they burned down and the cabin all comes back together. That scene was freaking amazing. I love that that was so cool. Yeah, I love that Ray takes all their rations heads out and then is so best in the head.

It winds up circling back to where they just were when they burned down that cabin and left it, and then in his stupor, it starts to reimagine it coming together, which is an interesting foreshadowing of the leader. And then of course the Bandits. The Bandits who keep reoccurring throughout the film anyways, kind of like they steal certain scenes. Every time they're in a scene, they steal it. I don't remember the name of the actor who played is sort of like the father, but he's a scenes toeal with.

That guy quite the stylish and then sort of like cock eyed hat. The whole thing with Sergeant Brown. It made me think of Psycho. I was like, oh my god, this movie pull to Marian Crane in a way with this character. We even hits his voiceover.

We hear at the beginning. It's literally putting us in his head a little bit. And he's the main guy. He's the closest thing we have to a hero. And then the film midway is just his daughter's gonna get raped in front of him.

And then he's gonna be set on fire. Well then yeah, we switch protagonists over to the other, to the convict. And the funny thing Heather is that, Oh, I don't know. Fifteen minutes in, because of the film's reputation, I said to myself, he's gonna die and he's gonna watch his daughter get raped. I just didn't think it was gonna happen at the forty minute mark.

Thought I was gonna be like climax something I did not know. You had some better foresight that me. I did figure just because sad, Yeah, it is what it is. I'm like, she's probably she is going to get sexually assaulted at some point, like because it's just too and I know, I know people might be like, oh, that's offensive, but this what would happen in the era for real, that's history, that's reality. That's just what the things that men way women do.

They're female abusers out there too. This is the things humans do. And it's not pretty. But it's not supposed to be pretty, and it shouldn't be pretty if you're putting it in a film. It should be ugly.

Rape is ugly, murder is ugly. It should hit Oh, it should feel like that if it's presented in a way where it's like, hey, this is rad, then something has slipped, you know, something has clearly gone awry. Just the absolute pumption of this film, just so many choices like that where I was like, that is bold, and I love it because that is at least with because the film, the film that it probably is the closest to in some ways, is The Great Silence, or as I love seeing the Italian title A Grande Salincio because that just sounds amazing in Italian. But even that is God, that movie's no fun either. But Lord, cut through it.

It's like cuther Snyde was like, hold our beer. Absolutely. Yeah. They talk about how dire Great Silence was and I was like, yeah, that was pretty bleak, but this one is way more bleak than that. I think that's why we love it.

It's like this felting not danger I'm sure, why not, like dangerous filmmaking in a sense that like nothing, nothing was safe and you didn't know where it was gonna go, and you buckled up. I can't imagine how audiences felt when they saw it when it came out, because today, I, like I said, I went into it with a high threshold because it had a reputation, and it definitely met that and exceeded it in some ways too. But what I really it's one of those films where you just feel like you've been through hell. You need a shower, need something like to cleanse you or to warm you up in this case, because yeah, you're just watching Sergeant Brown carry his daughter for because of the multiple dissolves, feels like it's an hours and hours.

I would have made it like twenty yards with her and that that would have been it. I would have been done. That's when I realize that, Okay, they're gonna they're like the lions on the gazelle. Now that's gonna happen soon. But I didn't think it'd be that soon.

That was very soon. But that was another great tense moment when they're all just and there were other moments even before that where we see enough of a distance between the group and Brown and they are openly even like with the Darling Clementine, they're these look at these guys, they were like the weird al of their times, doing the parodies over but literally calling him I think a pig in the lyrics he's right. He's like, guys, he's only like seven feet he can hear you, and you're like, oh, we can't wait to kill him. But that's it's almost it's less like stupidity and more just like a warning regardless, letting him know it's coming. I touched about how the protagonists switch once Brown is dead, and then basically the Bandits that we keep seeing they all get massacred by Ray, who is dying and as one of those great feudal moments where he's holding the chain of gold in his hands as he's dying, and you're just like, yeah, this guy's pretty fucked.

And then we go to the rest of the group who is still doing their thing, and they go from out of the frying pan into the fire. When they walk into that bar and here's all these Union soldiers, they're like, oh Jesus, now, what's gonna happen with these guys. It's so great that it's Okay, you thought the Bandits were bad, Now here's these Union soldiers, so let's see how this plays out. Those actors too, there was one particular soldier that had such a great face. He looked almost like if Jess Franco made a version of gen Kelly.

If that makes it? He said, he was like just Franco gen Kelly. I don't know. He just said as such a face. That guy makes a hand signal to Kathy.

Did you guys catch that? Like we first see him, he looks over and holds up two fingers, and I keep thinking, what did that mean? Do they know each other? Or was that like a little salute or I don't know exactly what that was? Right?

Was he propositioning? I don't know, But I kind of love the fact that I don't know, because I feel like this film to be captured something that I think is really hard to do, especially if anything historical is a sense of truth. I almost feel like the way for me, like, especially when we get to the films then he which I think we're about to it. Almost the film feels like a statement on just a futility of truth and the futility of actually knowing why anything happens because the audience do you find out the twist? And after this whole build up of Dean really trying to protect and he tried to protect her from getting raves and he just got his at they just beat him up till he couldn't, but he clearly is smitten with her.

He's trying to protect her, he cares about her, and it makes you care about him, and you're like, this is a good. Man, Heather. Where they're on the ledge through the mountain leeds, and I think that was the scene that did it for me. You see your contemplate or at least constantly looking over and he thinks she's going to jump, and that becomes a thing between the two of them, And yeah, that was like genuine concern, beautifully shot stuff too. Yes, no, that is such a great scene.

And yet we find out which, honestly, I will say, by the end, I figured we were going to find out that it was either Dandy Jim or Dean that was the kill, because Dandy Jim we had enough flashbacks with him to where I'm like, is that going to intersect Is his flashback going to end up intersecting with the flashbacks of the wife getting killed, or it's going to be Dean because we love him too much, which, of course, this universe is that the universe does not care about our feelings. Man mentioned the whole thing with the drawing straws thing that was not to kill the first guy, that was to kill the wife, correct. Exactly, and then they take you out in the beginning, but Dean. Goes to the grave because he ends up getting killed because again he's trying to protect Kathy.

And that just hit me so heavy, because I'm like God that I think one of the hardest things to nail about our existence in humanity is the fact that sometimes two things can be true at once. And because people, I think he made it with this tendency to try and we want things to be black and white, we want things to be simple, and some things in life are and white. A lot of what these guys do in this film that's not morally great. It's terrible, it's evil. Don't do that.

But there are people in real life too that are somebody can do something horrible but then do something and be capable of love or be capable of making something really beautiful. And that's a hard thing sometimes, I think, to swallow for us as a species, as a culture, but it is what it is. That's why you can There are certain artists that are terrible people that you wouldn't even want near your houseplant, but yet they're still capable of making something that moves you, and I just I always find that, I guess that dichotomy really fascinating and we see that, but also the fact that, like what is truth in this universe? The truth is like nobody's gonna know who killed her, and in fact, the whole thing's about to explode.

SCTV Farm Report. Style, real good good. The farmers would give us one a ten out of ten with that blowing up, in my opinion, not quite a brisky point level, but it's pretty close. And then it's like all of this truth just dies with them, and it just makes you think, like, can you even trust what people tell you in this? I don't know.

It just got me very existential, Like. It does hit hard in the sort of truth category, because I think it's a really interesting example of a lot of the spaghetti westerns, those sort of fair to Midland what they often lack as originality in the scripts. We've all seen enough spaghetti westerns to know that the scripts tend to be run of the mill. It's usually the esthetic, the action, the editing, the casting that carry most of them. But in this it seems like, Wow, the script is in many ways the star and then it's weed to this director who's incredibly confident and stylish and a great cinematographer who's shot eighty over eighty films with them in lots of different genres.

In putting westerns, this incredible cast. The sort of climate of late sixties early seventies down endings that that we're transgressing all genres at that time, including blockbusters and stuff in that regard. When Heather says, there's something really honest and truthful about this, Yeah, I think that's maybe why it resonates all these decades later, and that's probably why Tarantino loves it so much, is that, Yes, the brutality, it's got to be the most violent quastion of the seventies I would imagine, or certainly in the top five, like the all time, but because it really goes into these really almost grand guignal lengths. So I just wanted to chime in on that that as Heather was talking, it kind of, you know, it kind of gelled in my head what it was that attracts me to the film so much now that I've seen it.

Have that so bleak ending. I mentioned the thing before where it's like that's a downer ending, but you always wonder. Okay, we don't actually see childs of McMurphy die. We just know that they're probably going to there's nothing that's really going to save them. Maybe one of them's the thing, maybe one of them's not.

And if they get rescued or their dead bodies get taken back someplace, one of them may faw out and start taking over the rest of the world. But we don't know. And this one just have that bleakness of the dynamite blowing up that house and everyone is dead. There's no one makes it out of this movie alive. There's no happy ending for any of the characters, including those poor soldiers, the innocent bystandard in this But again, yeah, I love it.

And I do love it when a film has because again, it takes real khones. It takes gum shit to be like, not only are we not going to give you a happy ending, We're going to give you an ending where there's nothing you can tether it to. You're just left kind of unsettled. I figured something was going to happen along those lines. I didn't dectitely expect it to go that way with the dynamite and the whole bloody thing.

Oh yeah. As soon as you see the box of dynamite, you're like, Okay, she's going to get out of there by using this dynamite. No, well nope. And it reminded me a little bit of Butch Cassidy hold up in what the Bolivian Army Outside and that, but more bleak obviously, because there's a lot of humor in but Cassity. But this was just it reminds me a little bit of that in a really no good way.

With that one again freeze frame, where it's like, maybe Butch and Sundance made it out, you never know. Obviously there was a sequel that nobody talks about because it was shit, but or was that the prequels Butch and Sundance The Early Year or whatever? But it's oh my god, oh okay, that's it. Say, if you see the Early Years, it's usually a TV. Yeah.

No, that's a great comparison, though, I cannot imagine a bj Thomas song. And can you imagine they had an opportunity. They're just trapesing across that mountain. They could have just put on a real happy song, you know, and started whistling. Yeah, Little Bridge over the River QUI homage.

Not in this movie, not no way. Yeah that it is just too bleak and just and yeah, it's bleak in its content. It's and it's bleaking its vision and it's bleaking its presentation. They he saturated another film that reminds me of it. God, I'm like in remind me of mode here.

But is McKay and Missus Miller which was a few years later, but where the almost Zigmund flashed that film. These guys just got it by using shitty stock or it's got that look all by itself without any tinkering in the lab. It's interesting. The director would go by a different name as a writer, just a different combination of Joaquin Lewis Romero Marshent was like his depending on how he put those names together. It was the writer version, or was the director version because he wrote and directed this or co wrote and directed this, But it's two different names on the credits from what I understand.

And then he would work with the guy who wrote this one, Santielgo Mancata. He would work with him a few other times, but definitely worked on as a writer. They wrote one of the Sartana films, and so now I'm very curious to see that Sartana. So it was Sartana Kills them All? Another great title, right, And then I know that at least one of them worked on Atcha for the Honeymoon, which I've heard of that title forever and I have never seen it.

So now I'm like, maybe I should start tracking that one down. Oh yeah, you should totally see they have blood rules. Oh my god, it's it's may Obama. It's so good. Like I did a double take because especially with Bob, like some of Baba's films, there's twenty titles.

It's like, I think, is it Twitch of the Death Nerve? Also, this one's il Rosso Senno della folio. The Italians have the best titles mentioned to Western that you're covering, called Cemetery Without Crosses. That's a phenomenal title. Oh my god.

As a writer, that was. The American retitling of I think it was just called a rope palma a cult. So you had the rope and the gun. Amazing because normally the American red titles are lame. And that's in fact I told you when I was reading that Spaghetti Western book or whatever in Borders or Barnes and Noble.

The other thing I thought of after I saw the title was, man, what a great name for a bit, which it is. Yeah. Oh, they go by the number nine instead of the written world nine because when you go out and you google, it's yeah, Cutthroats nine just comes up a lot for the band. And then this one was Condenados a vedre, which is condemned to live. Oh, that's good too, that's yeah.

Also Mike Spanish is on points. I don't know about that. I'm so glad that we watched this because this was something that had been on my radar for so many years, and it's just okay, is it going to live up to the reputation? I think surpassed the reputation. I think that's very easy to just be like, oh, it's this grand house spaghetti western and all these guys kill each other or whatever.

But it's like, no, there's a lot of good stuff. Just like I said, the way that the story is told is pretty complicated, which I thought was a great. Addition to this. I'm so glad we watched it too. Like I was saying in the beginning, within the first fifteen minutes, I was noticing, like I said, just camera blocking, the shot selection, the editing, the camera movement was like, ooh, I'm in super capable hands.

I'd like to see where this goes. And then it just went in all these different directions, and like I said earlier, a lot of them very disturbing, but at fulfilling least. I felt like, if anybody's going to be a spaghetti Western enthusiast, this is required viewing. And sadly I came to it all these years later. But I don't feel too bad about it, just because there's never been obviously a really good there's not There haven't been a lot of good elements to draw from.

This does look like maybe sixteen millimeter blown up when it's hard to say. I'm not an expert on any of that, but I'm so glad we watched it because it was truly did something that was really uncommon unusual these days. It was a unique film. Well, it kind of tells Chekhov to go fuck himself too, because there are guns in this movie, but there's no gun fights. It's like you expect a duel or anything like that.

It's mostly shed A's knives. There's a hook let's used the one point dynamite obviously choking by chain. I love when the one guy is choking the guy in front of him and just walking with him. Oh yeah, that's a horror movie moment. If ever, I kept thinking too, how well not choreographed, but how in sync had those actors had to have been to be chained up like that and still be able to move in a way that wasn't just everybody didn't have broken femurs or whatever.

The film's a total gem and it's anyway listening. It's on to b really nice version out on YouTube as well. Yeah, do yourself a favor. WA's a movie. It's no fun because sometimes we need that.

Art is the thing that helps us have Catharsis sometimes with our own history and with our own existence. So super bleak, there's no question, but also really just really well made and very poetic in places, Like I said, I felt almost like a silent movie at times, because we would get traveling shots of people going through the elements, and the elements play a big part in the film. That are huge parts. I assume to remember a lot of lockdown camera or just like some hands rather than like the not a lot of room to lay down track up there. No gosh, which made that sort of ledge sequence.

I watched that a couple times because I was like, Wow, this is really well done. Yeah, I felt the danger for the actors. My mad respect. I could not do that. I couldn't do probably any the stuff.

I don't even like camping. I'm very fragile and delicate. All right, let's go ahead and take a break and play a preview for next week's show. Right after these brief messages. Matt from Viva again and Emily looking for something superior to streaming, a place with more than ten times the selection available on literally all of the streaming services combined.

Check out Character Videos rent by mail service, select from an unparalleled collection of over one hundred and fifty five thousand films, and get Blu rays, four k's and DVDs delivered directly to your door. Get in on it now at Scarecrowvideo dot org and rediscover the wonders of physical media. Can I help you? Well, there's a man. Involved in a relationship ship.

I made a real mess o things. He's trying to kill me. You have to help me. What do you want me to do? I want you to kill Me.

I always wondered what it would. Be like today, really violent death. Well now you know that's right. We'll be back next week to kick off a month that we're calling Valhalla, where we're covering four films starring the late Val Kilmer and starting with kill Me Again. Until then, I want to thank my co host Heather and Nick.

So, doctor Nick, what is the latest with you, sir? I'm still teaching over at Alfred University. In fact, just finished a Global Horror Movie class, which it was the second time I taught that, and it was so much fun. The students were amazing. I really had eclectic mix of films, things like we started off with Uncle Silas and Brides of Dracula and then went into then we did Lake of Dracula and then I think The Devils and then The Devil turned out.

That was like the third time I've shown that. I showed it to cult movies twice and then in Global Horror at the timing was amazing because of the release that it's getting and the con release and the fall release. But let me back that. Uh So that was a really fun successful We ended with things like Mystics and Bali and trained to boot on in one cut of the Dead. So it was a lot of fun in terms of writing.

Only right now, I've just started. I've begun writing a monograph about Cinema Paradiso. Oh nice, I'm actually gonna cover that movie next year. I should have you on. Absolutely, yeah, because what I'm planning on doing is writing the monograph size and then submitting it to the BFI series.

And I've started writing that a week ago. Actually, I've been researching it for a while because nostalgia is really the engine of that film, and so I wanted to get a good solid base for it. And now I'm writing it, which is great because I've loved that film ever since I first saw it. You got a few months here to get the rest of that done. Nick, I'm giving you a deadline right now.

Okay, I'll do my best. And Heather, how about yourself. Well, the latest installment of my new YouTube series, Films You Should Know, is live. This time around, I'm taking a little trip to Tarker's Mill for the nineteen eighty five Werewolf Jim Silver Bullet. I also recently got to guest co hosts Speaking the Devils on the Great Movies from Hell podcast where we talk about the devils and basically for any other sundry items, visit my linktree, slinktree dot com, Forward, slash moto, Heather, my YouTube, my Patreon, my substack.

All kinds of fun little benign goodies are over there. Thank you so much for joining me all. Thanks so much for listening everybody. I want to hear more of me shooting off my mouth. Check out some of the other shows that I work on.

They are all available at Weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit Patreon dot com slash projection booth. Every donation we get helps the projection Booth take over the world. In common.

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