Tag Archives: spaghetti westerns

Movie Title Hall of Fame: The Sublime, the Weird and the Ridiculous

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There are certain movie titles that make you pause and consider the mystery, allure or absurdity of their meaning. They can promise so much and deliver so little like Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966) or She Gods of Tiger Reef (1958). Or they can overdeliver on their promise to an astonished but grateful audience as in Russ Meyer’s infamous Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965). They can also mislead and confound you with wording so vague or fanciful that you have no earthly idea what it’s about as in Lord Love a Duck (1966), The Day the Fish Came Out (1967), or All the Fine Young Cannibals (1960), which inspired the name of the Brit pop trio that had a hit with “She Drives Me Crazy.” Then there are those completely frank and unambiguous titles that reveal the pure essence of the film in a no-nonsense manner – Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) and I Was a Male War Bride (1940). Or titles that are so much fun to say that you simply love saying them out loud just to hear the sound of them rolling off your tongue like Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1966) or Puddin’ Head (1941).

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Revenge in Four Acts

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The Italian film poster for DEATH SENTENCE (1968)

Film historians estimate that probably more than 550 spaghetti westerns were made in Europe (mostly Italy and Spain) during the height of that cinematic craze between 1961 to 1977. More than fifty per cent of those offerings were mostly forgettable programmers or mediocre genre fare or outright junk. And probably less than twenty-five per cent of the movies were high water marks or masterworks such as the Sergio Leone ‘Dollars’ trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) and The Great Silence (1968) and Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown (1967). Yet, there were still more than a handful of spaghetti westerns that were stylish examples of the form or offbeat and imaginative enough to warrant special attention and one of those is Sentenza di Morte (English title: Death Sentence, 1968), directed by Mario Lanfranchi.

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Gojko Mitic, the All-Purpose Native American from Yugoslavia

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Gojko Mitic plays the title role in the East German western, Chingachgook, the Great Snake (Chingachgook, die grosse Schlange, 1967), directed by Richard Groschopp.

Westerns not made in the U.S. have always carried a patina of the exotic for fans of the genre. There have been the countless spaghetti westerns from Italy and Spain, Australia has turned out several distinctive efforts (The Man from Snowy River, Mad Dog Morgan, The Proposition) and even Japan has their own brand of western as represented by samurai films like The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. But have you ever seen a western from East Germany during the 1960s when their film industry was under the control of the Socialist government? If not, Westerns with a Twist, a trilogy from DEFA (aka Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) starring Gojko Mitic is a great place to begin. This trio of “red westerns” includes The Sons of Great Bear (1966), Chingachgook, the Great Snake (1967) and Apaches (1973).   Continue reading →