Veteran television director Bernard L. Kowalski's gritty western "Macho Callahan" is as unsavory a western tale as you can imagine. David Janssen of "The Fugitive" fame plays the eponymous character in this 99-minute sagebrusher lensed on location in Durango, Mexican. Everything about "Macho Callahan" reeks of the countless Spaghetti westerns made between 1964 and 1974. Life has no value, and men are prepared to kill other men with the least provocation. Nevertheless, despite its incomprehensible screenplay by Richard Carr and Cliff Gould, this American made western boasts a top-notch cast, scenic Mexican settings, and the abundant production values. Macho is not a hero to be admired, but rather a protagonist to be tolerated simply because he is the lead character. The opening scene set in a Confederate prison camp is probably the best scene in the film. Our hero is released from serving time in the hole, a dark dungeon of a prison that lesser men fail to survive, but that our hero manages to overcome. Matt Clark is memorable as a sadistic prison guard who threatens to extend Macho's sojourn in solitary confinement, but Macho grovels before the guard and begs to be freed. This first scene is build around an execution that the Confederate prison camp commander has orchestrated. Even the name of the prison suggests its inherent inhospitable characteristics. Meantime, once back among the population of Union prisoners, Macho concocts a plan to break out. Once the dead Union prisoner is loaded into a wooden coffin to be driven off and buried in a long-forgotten grave, Macho pleads with the camp commandant (Richard Anderson of "Forbidden Planet") to let him put a box of the dead man's letters in his coffin. In reality, Macho has stashed enough explosives to blow the coffin as well as the corpse to smithereens. A riot breaks out, and the Confederates use their Gatling guns with deadly accuracy to mow down the unruly prisoners trying to escape. Only Macho Callahan manages to get away, and just by the skin of his proverbial teeth. Indeed, this is a tour-de-force scene and the setting looks just as harrowing as anything in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."
Once Macho gets out of the Confederate prison camp, he rides off and embarks on a journey to find the dastard, Duffy (Lee J. Cobb of "Lawman"), who recruited him under false pretenses to join the army. Eventually, he locates Duffy and kills him. Meantime, he guns down a former Confederate officer, David Mountford (David Carradine of "Young Billy Young") in a dispute over the sale of a bottle of champagne! Mountford's widow Alexandra posts a bounty on Macho's head, and an army of no-account gunslingers scour the landscape to find Macho. At the same time, Macho rapes Alexandra (Jean Seberg of "Breathless") and she winds up sticking with him and his sidekick Juan (Pedro Armendáriz Jr. Of "License to Kill") until the posse of gunmen run them down and shoot it out with them in the middle of nowhere. Nothing about "Macho Callahan" is remotely charismatic. As a hero, he comes up short, and we have no respect for him because he is as big a dastard as the dastard riding after him. The behavior of the main characters defies common scene. Why would Alexandra have anything to do with the man who gunned her stuck-up husband down? Moreover, after Macho takes her hostage and rapes her, she seems to grow closer to this reprobate. Nothing about Macho Callahan as a character is calculated to appeal of our sympathy as moviegoers who find anything redeeming about him. Ultimately, Macho is shot by the posse.
Review of Macho Callahan
