Tonino Valerii's TASTE OF THE KILLING really is about as fine of a non-Leone spaghetti western as one can hope for. Craig Hill is very well suited for the role of a laconic, cynical and somewhat snarky bounty killer working one hell of a racket shadowing gold and currency shipments to and from various banks. Presuming holdups, he simply waits until one gang or another decides to make a grab for the loot, eliminates them, returns the shipment and collects a 10% commission on the return & cleans up on the inevitable bounty payments on the heads of the gang members. Beats working a day job.
Things get interesting when his latest bounty gambit leads him into the town where the murderer of his brother (George Martin, unrecognizable in his makeup job) is leading the local pistolero gang who are waiting out a gold shipment they plan to hijack. Fat chance. Working with both the bank manager (Franco Ressel) and the owner of the local gold mine (Piero Lulli in a rare non-villain role), Craig Hill sets up a brilliant scam to insure his own protection of the shipment, wipe out the gang, clean up on the bounties, and follow the gold to it's next inevitable brush with another band of thieves who will inevitably have bounties on their heads, and start the whole thing all over again.
The first hour or so is almost hypnotic in it's syncopation of dialog, action, cinema kinetics courtesy of genre regular Stelvio Massi, and a peppy, imaginative musical score by Nico Fidenco. If the surroundings look familiar to spaghetti western fans they should be, as the bulk of the film is set in & around Carlo Simi's leftover sets from FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, which were literally good enough for a whole bunch of movies. The screen is also populated by a familiar cast of spaghetti and genre film regulars too: Fernando Sancho, George Wang, José Canalejas, Frank Braña, José Manuel Martín.
The film had also found a chance to see both of Leone's movies too, serving as a distillation of certain themes which the brilliant Valerii found useful. Hill's use of a rifle with a telescopic sight combines the finesse of Eastwood with the technically adept Van Cleef as the camera literally repeats certain shots made famous to young filmmakers the world over after Leone's first two movies had become a sensation. But this film adds some interesting twists, such as the local lawmen inflicting the standard spaghetti western sadistic torture interlude onto one of the bad guys for a change in a scene that only works to underscore the film's ambiguous morality. The only honest people in the film are the ones with something to lose, who depend upon Craig Hill's talents even though he's a cold blooded killer.
To his credit Valerii tries to inject a bit of humanity into the play by having a subplot about George Martin's villain with a heart of gold who wants to start a family with his girlfriend and young son. And it's here that the script takes a bit of a misstep by muddying up the proceedings with plot, though it does make Martin's villain into a sympathetic character -- perhaps even more sympathetic than the hero, which was probably the point. Then there's the big action climax with dozens of extras riding around raising dust and shouting while people get picked off from all angles. It all gets to be a bit too much for a stretch, the film's tightly woven ball threatening to unravel. Valerii picks up the pieces nicely in time for a taut, ingeniously photographed showdown scene, the film amusingly ending where it began with Hill watching another gang set up another robbery and you can just see the dollar signs in his eyes. Nice.
7/10
Things get interesting when his latest bounty gambit leads him into the town where the murderer of his brother (George Martin, unrecognizable in his makeup job) is leading the local pistolero gang who are waiting out a gold shipment they plan to hijack. Fat chance. Working with both the bank manager (Franco Ressel) and the owner of the local gold mine (Piero Lulli in a rare non-villain role), Craig Hill sets up a brilliant scam to insure his own protection of the shipment, wipe out the gang, clean up on the bounties, and follow the gold to it's next inevitable brush with another band of thieves who will inevitably have bounties on their heads, and start the whole thing all over again.
The first hour or so is almost hypnotic in it's syncopation of dialog, action, cinema kinetics courtesy of genre regular Stelvio Massi, and a peppy, imaginative musical score by Nico Fidenco. If the surroundings look familiar to spaghetti western fans they should be, as the bulk of the film is set in & around Carlo Simi's leftover sets from FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, which were literally good enough for a whole bunch of movies. The screen is also populated by a familiar cast of spaghetti and genre film regulars too: Fernando Sancho, George Wang, José Canalejas, Frank Braña, José Manuel Martín.
The film had also found a chance to see both of Leone's movies too, serving as a distillation of certain themes which the brilliant Valerii found useful. Hill's use of a rifle with a telescopic sight combines the finesse of Eastwood with the technically adept Van Cleef as the camera literally repeats certain shots made famous to young filmmakers the world over after Leone's first two movies had become a sensation. But this film adds some interesting twists, such as the local lawmen inflicting the standard spaghetti western sadistic torture interlude onto one of the bad guys for a change in a scene that only works to underscore the film's ambiguous morality. The only honest people in the film are the ones with something to lose, who depend upon Craig Hill's talents even though he's a cold blooded killer.
To his credit Valerii tries to inject a bit of humanity into the play by having a subplot about George Martin's villain with a heart of gold who wants to start a family with his girlfriend and young son. And it's here that the script takes a bit of a misstep by muddying up the proceedings with plot, though it does make Martin's villain into a sympathetic character -- perhaps even more sympathetic than the hero, which was probably the point. Then there's the big action climax with dozens of extras riding around raising dust and shouting while people get picked off from all angles. It all gets to be a bit too much for a stretch, the film's tightly woven ball threatening to unravel. Valerii picks up the pieces nicely in time for a taut, ingeniously photographed showdown scene, the film amusingly ending where it began with Hill watching another gang set up another robbery and you can just see the dollar signs in his eyes. Nice.
7/10