Camera movement

Tim Lucas

It's at this point that two continuous scenes were cut from the U.S. version. In the first, Angel Eye's pursuit of Bill Carson leads him to the ruins of a raided fort. This scene contains some of the most beautiful cinematography in the picture, notably a camera move around Angel Eye's head that seems to use the brim of his black hat as a dolly track. In this ruin, he meets a wild-eyed drunken Confederate sergeant played by the wonderful Spanish character actor Victor Israel.

45:45 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

Essentially, Blondie has been rearmed, but his gun is at rest. He's been given a reprieve of sorts, and he now has the luxury of time in which to think of a way out of his predicament. This shot is the film's equivalent of the inexpressibly moving crane shot that introduces the town of Flagstone in Once Upon a Time in the West. We open with this vignette of the Matthew Brady-like Civil War photographer.

1:35:43 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

What we see is already invested with depth of focus and breadth of composition. It feels quite complete. We need nothing else. And then the camera crane rises to reveal an unexpected extension of depth and composition that is absolutely majestic. This railroad station sequence was filmed at the La Calahorra station between Granada and Almeria.

1:36:07 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

As Monko hoists the dead body of Indio onto a cartload of corpses, the crane shot descends to reveal Groggy unexpectedly returning to the scene, not dead after all. About five years after this film was made, Mario Bava cast Luigi Pistilli in his giallo, Bay of Blood, in which he also played one of the last survivors in a kind of pyramid game of greed, in which another pile of murdered characters was stacked up pretty much like this. And in the last scene,

2:08:55 · jump to transcript →

just like this, and a Chapman crane. So you could tell it was shot by the same man who did this, okay? And it's one of those odd hybrid films. In 1970, sexploitation films didn't know where to go. They didn't know how far they could go, how far, what constitutes pornography, what's hardcore. In some cases, they would do a film that was softcore and maybe have one scene that's hardcore so they can splice it out. That was the year that everything was confused. Yes, everything was confused. That's right.

53:43 · jump to transcript →