The Moment to Kill Review
- 1968
- Dir: Giuliano Carnimeo
- Cast: George Hilton, Walter Barnes, Horst Frank, Loni von Friedl, Renato Romani, Carlo Alighiero, Rudolf Schundler
- Music: Francesco de Masi
Two famous gunmen, Lord and Bull are called to a southern western town by a judge to retrace a gold reserve, worth $ 500.000, hidden there in the last days of the Civil war by a Confederate colonel. Shortly after their arrival, the judge is killed, leaving them with only two clues as to where the gold is hidden: the name of the colonel's favourite book and the name of man's handicapped daughter. The girl is kept as a prisoner by her uncle, town boss Forester, on a secret location outside of town. Of course the whole world is after the gold, but to deter all others Forester has also hired an entire army of gunmen. Lord and Bull eliminate them all in a series of shootouts, but there are more villains than the usual suspects ...
This is Giuliano Carnimeo's first film as an independent director. He was only brought in when Enzo G. Castellari (who had written the original story with Tito Carpi) decided not to direct the movie. Carnimeo calls his film 'a thriller-orientated western'. Two of the biggest clichés of the thriller genre are respected here: there are two investigators, the smart sleuth and his more ungainly assistant, and there's a revelation in the last few minutes that will surprise most viewers who haven't read about it previously. Actually, with its dark humour and several scenes set in a slaughterhouse (!), the film often feels like a gothic thriller, occasionally interrupted for western action.
The film wasn't received well initially, but today many call it a forerunner of the Trinity movies. And yes, Hilton is a Trinity-like smiling hero and Barnes does the Spencer trick of hitting a man on his cranium instead of his chin, but there's hardly any slapstick here and the violence is often of a particularly gruesome nature. Even the jokes have a cruel edge, such as the use of Lewis Carrol's Humpty Dumpty when one of the villains is shot off a roof and therefore has a great fall. Still, as more often is the case with those transitional movies, it doesn't really know where to go: Hilton is a bit too often presented as the whimsical, almost supernatural hero who doesn't even wink when surrounded by dozens of crooks, while Barnes remains down-to-earth throughout the movie, unbeatable in the end maybe, but still vulnerable. But everything falls in the right place during the film's protracted finale, with Carnimeo cross-cutting between Hilton who eliminates Forester's henchmen in the slaughterhouse, and Barnes who is nearly clubbed to death in a secret torture chamber and only manages to escape thanks to a last, vigorous effort.
Horst Frank is a pleasure to watch (as always) as Forester's psychopathic son and Loni Von Friendl turns in an endearing performance as the colonel's handicapped daughter with a mind of her own. Stelvio Massi's camerawork is often inventive, but with only few scenes filmed on location, the town settings give the film a static, almost theatrical feel. Ironically, the few outdoor scenes are particularly fine, especially the opening scene, in which we meet some of the assorted group of villains Carnimeo has assembled for his movie, when Hilton and Barnes stop at the secret place where the colonel's daughter is held (we even have a glimpse of her). The location scenes where shot in the Tolfa mountain range, near Civitavecchia, and the Grotte di Salone, near Rome (where Clint Eastwood recovered from his beatings in A Fistful of Dollars). You wonder why not more location scenes were shot. It might have had a budgetary reason: one of the producers backed out when Castellari decided not to direct the movie. According to his fans Francesco de Masi's score belongs to his best. It's alternately eerie and melancholic and the song Walk by my side is definitely infectious: I watched the film late at night and was still humming it when a woke up the next morning.
--By Scherpschutter
