Death Rides a Horse Review

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Review of Death Rides a Horse (see also Available DVDs)

Like Tonino Valerii's Day of Anger, Giulio Petroni's Death Rides a Horse adopts the master/pupil plot from Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More. In both movies the older man, the ‘master’, is played by Lee van Cleef, who also played the older bounty hunter in Sergio Leone’s trendsetting movie. But while in Day of Anger friendship eventually turned into rivalry and hatred, in Death Rides a Horse, quite on the contrary, feelings of rage and vengeance eventually turn into friendship and mutual understanding.

In the first minutes of the movie, nearly an entire family is slaughtered. The men are killed and the women are raped, but the youngest son, a six years old boy, is overlooked by the murderers. This sequence, supported by a haunting Morricone score, is one of the most efficient and terrifying in the history of the spaghetti western, probably only topped by the massacre of the McBain family in Leone's Once upon a Time in the West. We then jump-cut to a moment in time fifteen years later: near the place where the family was slaughtered, the boy, now a young man, is practicing his shooting skills. It’s obvious that het he has revenge on his mind. At the same time, in a chain gang, a middle aged man is released after fifteen years of forced labour. We'll learn that he is after the same men, and when he stops at the graves of the murdered people and says he's sorry for the boy, we know that he's hiding a terrible secret and wonder what consequences this might have for both men.

In the end Death Rides a Horse not only adds a new dimension to the revenge western, but also to Van Cleef's acting range: here he's asked to impersonate an emotionally crippled, middle-aged man who becomes aware that life is escaping him. In true Freudian style, he tells the young man that if he had a son, he would have liked the boy to be like him. Their uneasy cooperation becomes a therapy: by instructing the younger man, and helping him to fulfill his mission, he not only dispels his own demons, but gives Law, his 'adopted son', the opportunity to live the life he himself never had. Law, clearly chosen for his good looks, didn't know how to ride a horse or to handle a gun when he arrived in Italy, so he was sent to the famous riding school of Lello Simonella, while a private 'maestro d'armi' (master of arms) followed him on the set. The script by Luciano Vincenzoni also needed some revisions. The film was shot in English and most dialogue lines were rewritten by both Van Cleef and Law. Due to all this, the production threatened to go on much longer than expected, and Leone's assistant Giancarlo Santi was sent to Almeria to give Petroni a hand.


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Like Petroni's own Tepepa (1968), Death Rides a Horse is a deliberately paced movie, slowly building up tension by adopting Leone's flashback structure, thoughtfully preparing its bravura finale that is quite unique within the genre. Petroni pervades his movie with an autumnal melancholic feel that already seems to anticipate the twilight spaghetti westerns of the very last stages of the genre, like Keoma (1976) and California (1977), but plot-wise there are also similarities to Hollywood westerns from the period that also tried to be revenge movies with a twist, notably The Bravados (1958) and Nevada Smith (1966). Performances are excellent: John Philip Law was often accused of being a one-note actor, but in this movie, he seems completely focused on the job. Luigi Pistilli is at his slimy best as a bandit leader turned politician; this is probably his best performance along with The Great Silence. Carlo Carlini's camera work is also very impressive; most interesting is a dusty ghost town in the middle of the Almeria desert, in which unwelcome guests are buried to their neck in the sand. Ennio Morricone's score is very unusual. Bizarre choral chanting is alternated with indistinctive eerie sounds and kettle drums. Raoul recorded a ''song called Death Rides a Horse, but in the film only the instrumental version was used.

Few films are perfect, or nearly so, and Death Rides a Horse does not belong to those few exceptions. The narrative is strong, but might still be a bit too drawn-out for some people's taste. I would say that overall the zoom lens has been used a bit too often and those rewritings with the help of the lead actors have led to a certain overdose of one-liners. Distributed by United artists, it was a great success in the US, despite an (in)famous 'It's not so hot' review' in the New York Times by A.H. Weiler, in which the film was pulverized. It has always been one of the more popular spaghetti westerns - usually in people's top 10 - and got a new boost thanks to Quentin Tarantino, who was heavily influenced by it when making Kill Bill.

Death Rides a Horse and Kill Bill

Tarantino not only borrowed the name of the main character and the film's most famous line ('revenge is a dish served cold'), he also used parts of Morricone's score, the main theme being played when the Bride faces O-ren and her bodyguards at the house of blue leaves. Furthermore the opening scene, in which the young Bill watches his family being slaughtered, is referred to in the anime sequence, the skull necklace becoming a skull ring, belonging to the man with the samurai sword who kills O-ren's father. It is also referred to, more indirectly, during the first fighting scene, when the Bride says she doesn't want to kill her opponent in front of her child. The typical spaghetti western technique of heavily filtered flashbacks, accompanied by eerie, unsettling sounds, is used several times in the movie when the Bride is reminded of the massacre during her wedding.


Related Pages:

Cast: Lee Van Cleef, John-Philip Law, Luigi Pistilli, Anthony Dawson, José Torres, * Mario Brega, Carla Cassola, Felicita Fanni, Romano Puppo, Remo Capitani, Bruno Corazzari - Director: Giulio Petroni - Music: Ennio Morricone

Screenshots from the MGM disc:


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Simon Gelten
Simon Gelten is a long time contributor to the SWDb. "I'm not as old as Tom B. but I'm working on it. I hope to catch up with him by the end of the next decade.", he says. Simon saw all movies by Sergio Leone and several by Sergio Corbucci in cinema, most of the time in Eindhoven, the city where he was born. Currently, Simon is living in Turnhout, Belgium. Simon is active within the database as both Scherpschutter and his alter ego Tiratore Scelto.
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