This is one the three best Westerns made by Sergio Corbucci, the others being Django and Il Grande Silencio, and it is the only comedy of these three.
The story is about a group of Mexican peasants and miners who attempt a revolution and the Polish mercenary Kowalski (Franco Nero) who shows them how. They are up against the exploitative establishment (Eduardo Fajardo in the kind of sleazy role he was born to play) and the sinister Ricciolo (Jack Palance) and his boyfriends (sic!) who are only after the bounty.
This is an unusual film in many respects. Despite being a western comedy, it does not spoof the traditional code of the west, it creates its own sources of humour. And despite being a western comedy, people do get killed and die gruesome deaths. This had the unfortunate consequence that some distributors cut the film to get rid of the more explicit scenes, and this also happened with the version I saw on British TV (possibly the standard English language version). However, the violence/gore was not gratuitous and the cuts leave some sequences rather unbalanced, e.g. the death of Franco Ressel's character is a gloriously ironic scene in the original but leaves the viewer rather puzzled in the cut version. The English version also suffers from a poorly translated dialogue that removes some of the sardonic humour.
The music by Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai is yet another classic, and it is put to excellent use in the climactic scene of the film, the gunfight in the bull ring. This is the most impressively staged gunfight I've seen in any Western, and I have seen an awful lot of Westerns in my life. Unmissable!
The story is about a group of Mexican peasants and miners who attempt a revolution and the Polish mercenary Kowalski (Franco Nero) who shows them how. They are up against the exploitative establishment (Eduardo Fajardo in the kind of sleazy role he was born to play) and the sinister Ricciolo (Jack Palance) and his boyfriends (sic!) who are only after the bounty.
This is an unusual film in many respects. Despite being a western comedy, it does not spoof the traditional code of the west, it creates its own sources of humour. And despite being a western comedy, people do get killed and die gruesome deaths. This had the unfortunate consequence that some distributors cut the film to get rid of the more explicit scenes, and this also happened with the version I saw on British TV (possibly the standard English language version). However, the violence/gore was not gratuitous and the cuts leave some sequences rather unbalanced, e.g. the death of Franco Ressel's character is a gloriously ironic scene in the original but leaves the viewer rather puzzled in the cut version. The English version also suffers from a poorly translated dialogue that removes some of the sardonic humour.
The music by Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai is yet another classic, and it is put to excellent use in the climactic scene of the film, the gunfight in the bull ring. This is the most impressively staged gunfight I've seen in any Western, and I have seen an awful lot of Westerns in my life. Unmissable!