User Reviews

THE MAN FROM CURSED VALLEY is an extraordinarily dull spaghetti western and one of the earliest of the genre. It's about a young woman who is attacked by a trio of perhaps the most unconvincing Indians ever, and who subsequently becomes almost catatonic as a result. She escapes and takes refuge in the arms of Ty Hardin, a former Hollywood star trying his luck in Italy, but nothing much ever happens to the two of them and the action is limited. The worst part of this is the grubby direction, with day-for-night filming used extensively, making it barely possible to see what's going on. As a result, all those great Spanish locations are wasted.

As a general rule, Spaghetti westerns depict life as cheap, death as inevitable, money as crucial to happiness, and villains as despicable sadists. The hero—or more properly the anti-hero—is often a monosyllablic man armed variously with a Colt .45 revolver or a machine gun concealed in a coffin. He may be a clench-jawed lawman, an army man, a grubby-looking bounty hunter, a well-dressed gambler, a rugged soldier of fortune, or an individual wronged who has saddled up for revenge against the dastards that either massacred his family and friends or betrayed him for gold.

Sergio Leone created the archetypal protagonist in "Fistful of Dollars" as an enigmatic stranger on horseback in a serape who was swift on the draw and played both ends against the middle with a nod to status quo social values. Film scholar Richard Dyer MacCann aptly described Italian westerns in the 1968 Annual edition of "The Americana Encyclopedia" as frontier yarns where "the corpses outnumber the horses." Indeed, the horses survive more often than their riders. Before Leone reinvented the Spaghetti western with "Fistful of Dollars," most European westerns resembled their more optimistic American counterparts.

"The Beast of Babylon against the Son of Hercules" director Siro Marcellini's western "The Man from Cursed Valley" represents an example of a spaghetti western before the advent of Sergio Leone. This tame sagebrusher deals with the theme of miscegenation. In other words, a white woman has settled down to live with a Native American. The Edward Di Lorenzo screenplay, based on a story by Eduardo ("Mátalo") Manzanos Brochero, takes place before the heroine has been subjected to years of captivity in a Native American village. John Ford made two prestigious westerns--"The Searchers" and "Two Rode Together"--about the ostracism that white women faced after having been enslaved by Indians. These women found it wholly impossible to reenter Anglo-Saxon society without being objects of contempt.

"The Man from Cursed Valley" unfolds after dark in an Indian tepee as three lusty braves try to rape a white woman, Gwen (Irán Eory of "Web of Violence"), and her Indian husband, Torito (Piero Leri of "Hercules and the Masked Rider") intervenes. While he swaps blows with them, she cuts her way out of the tepee with a knife. Incidentally, Torito may be an Indian, but he dresses like a white man and wears his hair cut short.

Gwen starts running and doesn't stop until she falls down the side of a steep hill and winds up in a ditch. A lone rancher, Johnny Walscott (Ty Hardin of "Merrill's Marauders"), is tending to a steer when he spots the dashing damsel-in-distress, and he swings astride his horse and lights out after Gwen. Meanwhile, the angry braves are pursuing Torito for interfering in their fun. Rain drenches Johnny as he pulls Gwen out of a ravine and takes her back to his cabin to dry out. Eventually, Johnny escorts Gwen to a Catholic mission in a nearby town where he has entrusted his pre-teenage daughter to the care of a Catholic priest who runs a school. We learn from the priest during an expository moment that Johnny married too young and his wife left him.

Anyway, Johnny informs Gwen that it is best to wed within your race instead of outside of it, but he leaves the decision up to the individual. Gwen's father Sam Burnett (José Nieto of "The Hellbenders") shuns his daughter. A well-to-do rancher, Burnett has no use for Indians. Nevertheless, Johnny believes fiercely that Gwen and her husband must reunite. When he isn't trying to convince Gwen to reconcile herself with your father and Gwen's husband to take Gwen back, Johnny deals with his happy young daughter.

Basically, "The Man from Cursed Valley" is incredibly tame. The Indians catch up with Gwen's husband and the first shots are fired about 71 minutes into his leisurely paced, somewhat well-made, English dubbed western. Unfortunately, Ty Hardin has been dubbed, but the lips are synchronized for the most part with the dialogue. Hardin is the strong, self-reliant young hero who can handle himself rather adeptly in a fistfight. He is clean-shaven and shuns wearing a six-shooter strapped across his hips. The Indians serve as the villains, but they are never dramatically portrayed as nefarious.

Director Siro Marcellini doesn't have any villains drooling evil and few men tote firearms tied low down on their thighs. Hardin gets into a couple of brawls with other whites, but it isn't until the last quarter hour that the Indians appear in great numbers with rifles and the shooting commences. The chief surprise here is the altruistic hero doesn't ride off into the sunset with the gal. The scenery isn't the raw, dusty spectacular southwest scenery of Almeria, Spain. The rolling hills are clad with trees and the landscape is far from parched looking. "The Man from Cursed Valley" is a European western, but it doesn't feel like one. The cynicism of the Leone style Spaghetti western is conspicuously absent. The lines of dialogue easily outnumber the bullets fired. Traditional Spaghetti western fans are hereby warned to ride clear of "The Man from Cursed Valley."