User Reviews

Listerning to the very good commentary on the Blue Underground edition of Dario Argento's directing debut,I was surprise to learn that Argento had originally started out as a screenwriter..

Attempting "a mix and match" of Argento-written films that I would be able to purchase fairly easily,I was happy to discover,that whilst Argento's most famous screen writing credit is on Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West,I was very pleased to find a forgotten 1969 Spaghetti western that Argento had co-written with Claude Desailly and Robert Hossein (who also directed and starred in the film,along with his dad doing the movies score!)called Cemetery Without Crosses.And with hand holding a cowboy hat,and the other holding a pair of Giallo black gloves,I felt that I had a great opportunity to take a look around the cemetery with no crosses.

The plot:

After being forced to watch her husband get brutally murdered by a gang of outlaws,Marie Caine's day is not made any better when,whilst burring her husband two friends rush to tell her the bad news that almost all of the livestock that she and her husband owned has been killed.

Desperate to show the outlaws that she wont go down without a fight,Marie gets hold of a horse and heads for the nearest town,where she eventually finds a mutual called Manuel. Initially turning down Marie's pleas to help avenge the death of her husband,due to Manuel (who seems to have a strange obsession with wearing black leather gloves)feeling that "You believe in revenge,I don't."

Manuel has a temporally laps from his written in stone rules of staying out of "other peoples business" and takes a quick look around his town,where he discovers all of the outlaws beating the residents up and beginning to act like the "law" of the town.Whilst still fearing about kicking off a cycle of revenge,Manuel begins to feel that if he does not help Marie to avenge the death of her husband and his (former) best friend,then the outlaws are defiantly gonna make sure that their "cycle of terror" never leaves the town,until they have complete control.

View on the film:

The first main thing that I have to say about this wonderful film,is that if you are a fan of dialogue-heavy movies,then prepare yourself to see something completely different,with this movie having only around 30 lines of dialogue for the whole of its 90 minute running time.

Impressively screenwriters Robert Hossein,Dario Argento and Claude Desailly show that sometimes less really is more,with the chosen moments of dialogue being placed at perfect points in the films running time,thanks to it either helping to develop the films plot,or to push the mood of the movie into grimmer territory.

Along with the film being one which can be easily enjoyed in its own right,the movie is also very interesting to look at in seeing the start of some themes that co-screenwriter Argento would expand upon in the future,with Manuel wearing black leather gloves,and the presence of a very prominent female lead character being two of the main things that Dario would carry on with later on.

Although I have read quite a few times in magazines and online people saying that a scene in a film "could be put on a wall as a work of art",this has been one of the few films I have seen where it looks like the camera is filming actually works of art!.

For his stunningly elegant directing,Robert Hossein shows himself to be a master of the wide shot,with the beautiful,wilderness natural locations being allowed to shine to their fullest,As Manuel goes around the increasingly dangerous wilderness of the town to help Marie avenge the death of her husband.Along with the stunning wide shots,Hossein gives the film a great "grim" look,which allows the wonderful performances from himself and the fantastic Michele Mercier (who had both starred in the 1964 film Angelique)to go from an attempt to find hope,to falling into dying despair.

Final view on the film:

A wonderful,elegantly sparse Spaghetti Western with great performances and beautiful directing from actor,co-screenwriter and director Hossein.

I have seen every Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, John Wayne western and this movie just fails, if for no reason there is no conversation just dumb blank stairs for most of this poor western.

This is HORRIBLE in comparison to the Good the Bad & the Ugly, For a few dollars more a A Fistful of Dollars, if you expect that type of movie you will be let down as the wife and I wasted 1.5 hours with dumb stares.

Michele Mercier seems to have past away due to BOREDOM at the watering trough

I very seldom give a movie this bad a rating, some of the scenery was very nice I just cannot think of anything positive about this movie aside from the ending.

"Death rides a horse" watching that now with fingers crossed.

Cemetery Without Crosses is a spaghetti western probably most famous for being co-written by Dario Argento. In fact, he worked on the screenplay to this one shortly before directing his seminal debut thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and after co-writing the classic Once Upon a Time in the West. It would only be fair to say that this one doesn't match up to either of those, although it's a solid enough Euro western all the same.

Its plot line is typical enough for a spaghetti western. An enigmatic loner called Manuel infiltrates a bandit gang in order to get revenge on behalf of a beautiful widow whose husband they murdered. Whilst the story-line is fairly standard, the lack of dialogue certainly isn't. It isn't immediately obvious but there really is hardly any of it. Mostly, the plot is told by imagery. This is sometimes done really well, although it does distance us a bit from the characters, making it a little hard to truly emphasise with them. There are some interesting details though, such as the fact that Manuel lives alone in a ghost town. This setting is a good one and adds an element of the slightly surreal to proceedings. There is also a somewhat atypical scene at the bandit gang's dinner table, which plays on audience expectations. Basically, what seems like a very tense moment suddenly turns into a moment of bizarre comedy.

The film stars Michèle Mercier who will be familiar to some for her performance in 'The Telephone' segment of Mario Bava's excellent horror omnibus Black Sabbath. But this is not really an actor's film. The dialogue is too sparse and the characterisations too vague. It's more an interesting example of visual story-telling. It also has a very downbeat ending, which was something de rigueur in the late sixties. It fits this story well enough though.

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** A rider is chased by many others. He reaches his home, his wife watches in fear. The hunters catch him, take him to the tree and hang him while his wife keeps screaming. The boss of the hunters looks at her but doesn't say a word. They all ride away when the deed is done. The 2 brothers of the hanged man are coming home. They watch the young widow dig a grave. Nobody offers help. The 2 brothers leave some money on the table and ride away.

The first 10 minutes of this movie are passing by without any dialogue, set in a pale desert land without any colours. Yes, `Une corde, un colt' is very stylish, just like the other great French western from 1968 (co-produced with Italy), `Le Grand Silence'. It was much more than just a job for Robert Hossein, who co-produced, directed and co-scripted the movie and also played the main character, gunfighter Manuel. His personal ambitions made this movie so much better than the usual genre fast-food. He used symbolism from the B&W era, for example the scene when Manuel comes around to visit the widow: you see the lonely rider far away in the desert, slowly coming closer, whilst her black scarf is draped over a bush in the foreground. The black scarf is so much bigger than the man due to camera perspective, and you now: he will arrive too late, and she will be dead. Poetry in pictures.

The film music is a cross between traditional US title songs (`the days are dust and the nights are black') and Morriconean trumpets as they were en vogue in the 60s. No big experiments here, but good craftsmanship.

Back to the story: the widow hires gunfighter Manuel to kill the villains. He says: `Vengeance will never satisfy you, you just don't realize it yet.' But he picks up the job and kills all the bad guys. Hossein as Manuel does not look like the normal Clint Eastwood stereotype. His soft mouth and sad eyes seem to say he is a victim of fate, not a hero, not even an anti-hero. He wears a black glove on his right hand only to symbolize his dark side. In a deserted ghost-town, he plays the roulette against himself, all became meaningless, there is no victory. At the end of the movie, Manuel throws his gun away (a cliche since the 50s), but then the daughter of the villain uses this opportunity to kill him with a rifle. They never did this to John Wayne and Gary Cooper... Interesting note: Dario Argento contributed to the screenplay, and he worked on another film with a revenge story the same year: Once Upon A Time In the West!