From the Rental Vault (1966): The Hills Run Red

Although Italian moviemakers had been creating American Western movies for some time, Sergio Leone along with Clint Eastwood defined the "spaghetti Western" genre with his "Man With No Name" trilogy in the mid-1960s. Those three, especially the pair's first collaboration in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, featured several of the Italian interpretation's key features: characters pushed past both archetype and stereotype straight into mythical icon status, stories in which heroes had a little villain in them and some villains showed a human side and situations that bypassed grand schemes and themes for low-level grifters, cowboys and crooks. Quentin Tarantino often travels this path today.

Leone's success inspired several other high-profile Italian directors to try their hand at the American west, including the award-winning director and screenwriter Carlo Lizzani. Working as "Lee W. Beaver," he helmed two Westerns, including The Hills Run Red. Bandits Jerry Brewster and Ken Siegel have stolen several hundred thousand dollars from a government office and try to flee. In order to make sure Siegel gets away, Brewster draws pursuing cavalrymen after him and is caught. He serves five years and on release heads for his home, where he hopes to find his wife and son waiting for him. But they are gone, and it turns out Siegel broke his promise to care for them and has used the robbery's take to finance his ranching operations. With his lieutenant Mendez, he is slowly bullying and cowing the other ranchers so he can control the whole territory.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly worked because even though its characters were absolutely nothing new to the Western story, the three actors playing them -- Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach -- had the skill and charisma to make them larger than life. The Hills Run Red has Thomas Hunter, who displays less charisma than his saddle. The alpha baddie Siegel, played by Italian character actor Nando Gazzolo, is even duller. On the other hand, Dan Duryea as the wanderer Winny Getz and Henry Silva as the jovial psychopath Mendez light up whatever screen time they have -- I can't imagine I'm the first person who watched this movie who wishes they'd been the leads instead of Thomas and Gazzolo.

Hills starts to have some interesting things to say about revenge and its cost, but loses that thread when Brewster gets to town and starts to work with the townspeople against Siegel. The story itself starts lurching around from one implausibility to another and winds up just filling space in between an interesting opening third and the final gunfight. It's not the worst spaghetti Western to ever cross the Atlantic, but viewing it is more for the completist than the casual movie fan.

(PS -- If you do decide to rent or watch The Hills Run Red, specify the 1966 Western. There is a 2009 horror movie that goes by the same name, and judging by its IMDb entry it's the same exercise in anencephaly that keeps being released over and over again for people who can be entertained by senseless gory slaughter.)