Lauf um dein Leben

(aka: RUN, MAN, RUN)

Decent sequel to Sollima's great spaghetti western, THE BIG GUNDOWN (1966), this one involves the return of Cuchillo (Thomas Milian) who helps revolutionary Santillana (John Ireland in a small role) return $3,000,000 in gold from Texas back to Mexico. Cuchillo also makes a promise to an old revolutionary before he dies to also help return the gold in order to help finance the revolution and overthrow the dictator, Porfirio Diaz.

But Cuchillo also has to deal with former sheriff Cassidy (Donal O'Brien) who also wants the gold for himself. Then there are the French assassins and bounty hunters who also want a share as well as blond Salvation Army turned gold huntress Penny (Linda Vargas) and many other bandits, too numerous to name. As comic relief we have Cuchillio's girlfriend (Chelo Alonso) following Cuchillio across the desert, trying to force him to give up the search for the gold and marry her. Cuchilio's relationship with her can be funny at times.

The nighttime gunbattle in the Texas town with the Mexican bandits is suspenseful as we see Cuchillio go to work on the bandits with his slick knife throwing skills as he kills each bandit, one after the other. It doesn't hurt that Cassidy also helps him since he needs Cuchillio to help him find the gold. The two of them eventually find out that the gold was melted down into the shape of an old printing press and painted black in order to hide it. Now that's an imaginative touch instead of the usual cave or hole in the ground plot device where people want to hide gold.

The ending is roughly the same as in THE BIG GUNDOWN only not as good since Donal O'Brien can't hope to top Lee Van Cleef in the earlier film. In fact, if there's one big flaw about this film, it's that Van Cleef isn't in it. Otherwise I'd rate it a couple of notches higher.

Blue Underground's anamorphic DVD looks pretty good and the sound and dubbing is excellent. As an earlier reviewer mentioned, there is an interview with director Sollima and Milian and their reflections on the film, as well as an interesting 1969 mini-documentary on the making of spaghetti westerns and their (then) popularity in Italy, including behind the scenes looks at this film as well as Sergio Corbucci's THE GRAND SILENCE (1968).

Decent flick although I think there are better.

6 out of 10

Sergio Sollima's "Corri, Uomo, Corri" aka. "Run, Man, Run!" of 1968 is a great and very funny sequel to his 1966 masterpiece "La Resa Dei Conti" aka. "The Big Gundown". As Sollimas two other Westerns, this is once again a quite political film, but unlike "The Big Gundown" and "Face To Face", it is so humorous, that it could actually be described as a Spaghetti Western Comedy.

After a dying revolutionary entrusts the hideout of a fortune to him, Mexican petty thief and excellent knife thrower Cuchillo (Tomas Milian, who already played Cuchillo in "The Big Gundown") is chased through the Mexican/Texan borderland by a gang of Mexian bandits, two French mercenaries, who work for the Mexican government, and Nathaniel Cassidy (Donal O'Brien), an American gunslinger who, although primarily interested in money, still has some of his former ideals left. Furthermore Cuchillo is constantly followed by his loving girlfriend Dolores (beautiful Chelo Alonso), who is sexy and passionate, but also very jealous and short-tempered. On his run, Chuchillo first meets, and travels with a pretty blonde Salvation Army activist called Penny (Linda Veras), much to Dolores' disfavor, and later teams up with Cassidy against their mutual enemies.

The acting in this movie is great, especially Tomas Milian (one of my favorite actors) and Donal O'Brien deliver excellent performances as the two main characters. The supporting cast is also very good, the legendary John Ireland has a small role as a the leader of a Mexican revolutionary squad. The cinematography is great, and so is the music by Bruno Nicolai and Ennio Morricone. Many scenes in movie are very memorable, some of them very funny , a Mexican bandit gang leader orders his wife to hold off on giving birth to their child for a few days for example, because he doesn't want his son to be a "Gringo" born in the US, and the French hit men played by Luciano Rossi and Marco Guglielmi are two very satirical villains.

Maybe not quite as brilliant as "The Big Gundown", but still an excellent movie, "Run, Man, Run!" is a witty, great and very entertaining Spaghetti Western, a must see for genre-fans, but also recommended to everybody else.

"Run, Man, Run" (1968) is a Revoloutionary Spaghetti Western directed by the third "Sergio" (after Leone and Corbucci) Sergio Sollima. It stars Thomas Milian as Cuchillo the peasant, reprising his role from "The Big Gundown" (1966), who becomes involved in the hunt of a large cache of gold in Texas.

This is a semi-sequel to "The Big Gundown", but like the Dollars trilogy one can be watched without the other and no confusion arise. In fact, it is probably best to watch this and not compare it to the two previous Sollima Westerns as this movie will be found wanting, which is not to say it is a poor film. Quite the opposite, it is very well directed, acted (especially by Milian), scored by Bruno Nicolai (although allegedly Ennio Morricone gave a helping hand) and the cinematography by Guglielmo Mancori is fantastic. It is just that in this picture what you get is absolutely what you see; there isn't any Fascist allegory hiding underneath like there is in "Face to Face" (1967) or the character complexities there is in "The Big Gundown". Perhaps because Sollima is a better director than scriptwriter (this is his only Spaghetti Western where Sergio Donati doesn't have a screenplay credit). Still, this is a very good Western, way above the average fare and a film anybody with even only a superficial knowledge of the genre will acknowledge as a great.

This is another fine Spaghetti Western, actually a sequel to THE BIG GUNDOWN (1966), from the same director-star team; in the accompanying interview, Sollima said that he felt the "Cuchillo" Sanchez character from that film (who, basically had been a subsidiary to Lee Van Cleef's lone gunman) was worthy of his own vehicle.

However, having perhaps overdosed on films from this subgenre over the last two weeks, I was slightly underwhelmed by it (being preceded by my first viewing of the German Expressionist classic WARNING SHADOWS [1923; see my review elsewhere], which was well and truly impressive, may also have had something to do with this!): throwing in everything but the kitchen sink in the various characters' search for gold, the film still offered nothing that was essentially new!!

In fact, here we have Tomas Milian's "Cuchillo" (whom Sollima admits to have been inspired by Toshiro Mifune's role in Akira Kurosawa's SEVEN SAMURAI [1954]) being helped, hindered or pursued by a mysterious American bounty-hunter, a couple of French mercenaries, a bandit horde, Mexican revolutionaries (led by John Ireland, who turns up for a two-minute bit!) and the Army - not forgetting the attentions of two beautiful women, his feisty and extremely jealous Mexican girlfriend and a statuesque Salvation Army officer (but who's not above a little greed)! All this tends to make the film episodic (but which doesn't hang together as well as the first film), overlong (for no real purpose) and exhausting (there's less action than usual for a Spaghetti Western, with little of it that's actually memorable, but a good deal of talk - this is one of the most overtly political films in the genre!). The comedy, too, is more pronounced than in THE BIG GUNDOWN and, indeed, apart from the lead character's constant running (hence the title) and distinctive knife-throwing, he seems to be a different person - as if the characteristics of roles Milian had played in the interim, such as those in FACE TO FACE (1967; also directed by Sollima) and DJANGO, KILL! (1967) had filtered through to his interpretation of "Cuchillo" here!

There's still the shaky 'alliance' between the Mexican and an American ex-sheriff (played this time around by Donal O' Brien, as a cross between the Lee Van Cleef of THE BIG GUNDOWN and the William Berger of FACE TO FACE!) and even the double duel at the end - but with the former not being a chase and the opponents in the latter amounting to only minor characters, i.e. not alter egos as in the earlier film, these elements don't have quite the same impact (though I understand that Sollima couldn't merely repeat himself)! Besides, after two hours the film can only come up with an unresolved ending (with the gold still unclaimed); Sollima, however, feels it was the right thing to do!

From this review, one might think that I didn't like the film all that much or that I spent too much space comparing it to other Spaghetti Westerns - but the star rating should indicate otherwise: it's solid, flavorful and enjoyable (if overly familiar) with a few good action highlights; best of all is the rousing and infectious score by Ennio Morricone (although, due to some contractual glitch, it was credited to his friend and habitual conductor Bruno Nicolai!).

With respect to the supplements included on the Blue Underground DVD: I'll comment elsewhere on the TV special from 1968 about Spaghetti Westerns; the 17-minute featurette which includes interviews with both Sollima and Milian (it was especially great to listen to him talk about this period of his career, having missed out on his interview on BU's edition of DJANGO, KILL!) is wonderful: Sollima is as eloquent and witty here as he was on the interview featured on the Italian DVD of THE BIG GUNDOWN; Milian, apparently, was hurt by the director's put-down of his "Actor's Studio" background and here he comments how his carefully developed characterization of "Cuchillo" as a trapped rabbit was more or less ruined during the editing stages (Milian even allows himself a self-compliment by saying that he's "f***ing talented" but, then, he made poignant comments about his approaching old age)!; we're also offered the original Italian credit sequence (which adds some blue to the red tones of that in the English version), the trailer, a poster gallery and talent bios for both star (I was distressed to learn that when he returned to the U.S., all his great work in Italy meant naught to the Hollywood producers and that, in order to get even a supporting part, he had to reduce himself to testing for it!!) and director.

Imagine an Italian western inspired by Marx - not Groucho, but KARL. Springing from the loins of the European mini-revolutions of 1968 comes a western with a conscience, courtesy of spaghetti socialist Sergio Sollima, who recycles his most memorable character from the 1967 The Big Gundown and builds an entire film around him.

Cuban-born Tomas Milian returns as Cuchillio, a wily yet endearingly naive opportunist who's quick with a knife but not so quick on the uptake. A quick spell in a border prison sees him share a cell with a seditious poet named Rodriguez, whose dying breath reveals the last resting place of a $3 million cache of revolution-bound gold. And so begins Cuchillio's journey, spreading his proto-revolutionary seed across the Texas border whilst pursued by a sleazy assortment of cutthroats and would-be revolutionaries, spaghetti western regular Donal O'Brien playing a sheriff with a conscience, two French secret agents, his jealous fiancé Dolores (played by the fiery Chelo Alonso), and a blond sergeant in the Salvation Army, a woman who sticks out of her unlikely surroundings like a turd tambourine. Cuchillio himself spends most of his screen time bound, gagged with dynamite, spreadeagled in some godforsaken location, or in one stunning sequence, strapped to the blade of a windmill. And STILL He doesn't lose his sense of humor.

Like The Good The Bad And The Ugly it's a deliberately open-ended epic quest for hidden treasure, but without Leone's grandiose scale and pretentious camera histrionics. It's more like The Wizard of Oz wrapped in a burrito, and peppered with the most random of supporting characters. The usual grimness of these spaghetti westerns is contrasted with Tomas Milian's comic timing, a rousing score by an uncredited Ennio Morricone, and a surprising cameo from veteran American actor John Ireland as a crusty, battle-scarred soldier of the class struggle.

Socialist westerns don't usually come this entertaining - come to think of it, socialists are rarely funny at all! So enjoy the picaresque, picturesque and thankfully undogmatic 1968 Run Man Run.