"Seven Magnificent Guns" director Romolo Guerrieri helmed this above-average but uneven spaghetti western with Mark Damon, Rosalba Neri, and Lawrence Dobkin,after he made the aforementioned epic. "Johnny Yuma" wa released in the mid-1960s when Italian westerns were just hitting their stride. Indeed, "Johnny Yuma" illuminated screens before Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" reached cinemas. This gritty, sun-drenched, shoot'em up set in the arid Southwest imitates traditional American oaters as well as revisionist Spaghetti westers. Like a 1950s' Hollywood western, Guerrieri's sagebrusher boasts a title credits ballad. Mark Damon makes a serviceable hero, but he isn't cast in the steely mold of the monosyllabic bounty hunter. He is more of a 1950's American western hero. Moreover, he makes a point of it after he guns down three hombres and refuses to collect the bounty on them. Meanwhile, "Johnny Yuma" delivers a double-digit. Spaghetti western body count and conjures up a reasonable amount of suspense in its simple, largely dramatic, often brutal saga. The gang of trigger-happy ruffians led by a scheming wife resolve to eliminate the heir to a fortune. Guerrieri and co-scenarist Fernando Di Leo of "A Fistful of Dollars," along with Sauro Scavolini and Giovanni Simonelli of "Any Gun Can Play," have contrived a largely predictable western about betrayal, murder, and revenge. The surprises aren't plentiful, but this violent opus doesn't dawdle. The gorgeous scenery around Almeria, Spain, where "Johnny Yuma" was lensed by "Gunmen of the Rio Grande" cinematographer Mario Capriotti, serves a metaphor for life and death. Capriotti makes you feel the heat, the sweat, and the flies. Guerrieri and Capriotti like to indulge themselves with pans that rotate 360 degrees, whether they are surveying the rugged scenery or a players in a poker game. Despite its reliance on dramatic gimmicks, Guerrieri and his writers occasionally allow reality to intrude into the plot. Principally, they stress that the west of "Johnny Yuma" is a place where you can suffer death just as fatally from a gun barrel as from lack of water.
The eponymous hero of "Johnny Yuma" is an accurate, young, swift-on-the-draw gunslinger who blasted his way to fame in Yuma with his six-gun. Johnny's uncle, wealthy land owner Thomas Felton (Leslie Daniels of "Paisan"), has decided to leave everything that he owns to the pistol-packing protagonist, Johnny Yuma, because the latter is more suited to running a ranch than anybody on his wife's side of the family. We are told that Felton and his wife didn't have children. Of course, Felton's beautiful but treacherous wife Samantha (Rosalba Neri of "Lady Frankenstein") has tried without success to convince her cigar-smoking, wheel-chair bound husband to entrust everything to Pedro (Luigi Vannucchito of "The Red Tent"), her low-down brother. As it turns out, Pedro shows up to shoot Felton in cold blood at point blank range while Felton is practicing his marksmanship with black powder arms. The wife dispatches a Mexican servant, Luis 'Sancho' Fernandez, to take a letter to an ex-lover, Linus Jerome Carradine (Lawrence Dobkin of "Patton"), to kill the servant. The villains have done a shrewd job of implicating poor Sancho in the death of Felton. The remainder of the action is spent showing our hero dodge endless bullets while dropping his adversaries dead in their tracks without more than a single shot. Our hero's avowed enemy, Carradine, changes side, and they are virtually indestructible together in a gunfight. During an early saloon brawl scene, Carradine and Yuma meet and swap out gun belts. Yuma carries his Colt's revolver on his left hip, while Carradine wears his on his right hip. Carradine has a gun belt that allows him to detach the holster without having to wait for his six-gun to clear the leather. When Johnny shows up in San Marco, everybody initially mistakes him for Carradine since he has Carradine's gun belt with the initials LJC cinched around his waist.
Although "Johnny Yuma" is driven by tragic events, Guerrieri makes time for humor that seems out of place. For example, Rosalba's strip-tease for the parrot scene looks straight out of a saucy Italian sex comedy. More often than not, the action is pretty heavy-handed rather than light-footed. Poor Mexican farmers bit the dust just to show how vile the villains are, and one of these hellions kills a innocent little boy. Indeed, the villains in "Johnny Yuma" emerge as incredible dastards. In one scene, these unsavory thugs rough up our hero, giving him a real beating along the lines of "A Fistful of Dollars," but they don't beat Johnny so horribly that he can only crawl afterward. Eventually, our youthful hero Johnny teams up with an older, wiser hombre,Carradine in a standard-issue Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid relationship where an older man trains a younger man. They have done everything to make Carradine look like Lee Van Cleef's Mortimer from "For A Few Dollars More," right down to his suitcase that accommodates his six-gun. Questionable comic relief is provided by a goofy Mexican peasant who constitutes an outrageous stereotype. "Vengeance is Mine" composer Nora Orlandi provides a charismatic orchestral soundtrack that enhances the mood of this melodrama.
The eponymous hero of "Johnny Yuma" is an accurate, young, swift-on-the-draw gunslinger who blasted his way to fame in Yuma with his six-gun. Johnny's uncle, wealthy land owner Thomas Felton (Leslie Daniels of "Paisan"), has decided to leave everything that he owns to the pistol-packing protagonist, Johnny Yuma, because the latter is more suited to running a ranch than anybody on his wife's side of the family. We are told that Felton and his wife didn't have children. Of course, Felton's beautiful but treacherous wife Samantha (Rosalba Neri of "Lady Frankenstein") has tried without success to convince her cigar-smoking, wheel-chair bound husband to entrust everything to Pedro (Luigi Vannucchito of "The Red Tent"), her low-down brother. As it turns out, Pedro shows up to shoot Felton in cold blood at point blank range while Felton is practicing his marksmanship with black powder arms. The wife dispatches a Mexican servant, Luis 'Sancho' Fernandez, to take a letter to an ex-lover, Linus Jerome Carradine (Lawrence Dobkin of "Patton"), to kill the servant. The villains have done a shrewd job of implicating poor Sancho in the death of Felton. The remainder of the action is spent showing our hero dodge endless bullets while dropping his adversaries dead in their tracks without more than a single shot. Our hero's avowed enemy, Carradine, changes side, and they are virtually indestructible together in a gunfight. During an early saloon brawl scene, Carradine and Yuma meet and swap out gun belts. Yuma carries his Colt's revolver on his left hip, while Carradine wears his on his right hip. Carradine has a gun belt that allows him to detach the holster without having to wait for his six-gun to clear the leather. When Johnny shows up in San Marco, everybody initially mistakes him for Carradine since he has Carradine's gun belt with the initials LJC cinched around his waist.
Although "Johnny Yuma" is driven by tragic events, Guerrieri makes time for humor that seems out of place. For example, Rosalba's strip-tease for the parrot scene looks straight out of a saucy Italian sex comedy. More often than not, the action is pretty heavy-handed rather than light-footed. Poor Mexican farmers bit the dust just to show how vile the villains are, and one of these hellions kills a innocent little boy. Indeed, the villains in "Johnny Yuma" emerge as incredible dastards. In one scene, these unsavory thugs rough up our hero, giving him a real beating along the lines of "A Fistful of Dollars," but they don't beat Johnny so horribly that he can only crawl afterward. Eventually, our youthful hero Johnny teams up with an older, wiser hombre,Carradine in a standard-issue Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid relationship where an older man trains a younger man. They have done everything to make Carradine look like Lee Van Cleef's Mortimer from "For A Few Dollars More," right down to his suitcase that accommodates his six-gun. Questionable comic relief is provided by a goofy Mexican peasant who constitutes an outrageous stereotype. "Vengeance is Mine" composer Nora Orlandi provides a charismatic orchestral soundtrack that enhances the mood of this melodrama.