¡Corre, Cuchillo... corre!

This film reuses the lead character of LA RESA DEI CONTI and is the third of the Sollima/Milian series. Cuchillo (spanish for "knife") is pretty skilled with this weapon and proves its usefulness in a lot of occasions. During the plot he acts as a maverick, with the only help of his fiancé Maria who wants him finally to get married. As a cultural counterpoint there is the other maverick Cassidy who is depicted as Nordic precise and cold. While being competitive at first they later join for purpose. Overall this sequel suffers from an overload of duel and fighting situations which often seem to be completely senseless, e.g. the duel between Cassidy and José in the beginning. The revolution is not more than a background. Less characters and more character development would have helped. Milian plays with his typical humor and very often we see his suffering face in repetitive scenes of torture. . Recommended for fans of the genre and of Milian. Rich daughter Penny (Linda Veras) is working for the salvation army and wears black fish-net stockings which I consider a minor inaccuracy ;-)

The Nicolai/Morricone score is nice but too hammering for my taste, cinematography is well above average. For me this film is the most humorous of the 3 Sollimas.

6/10

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.

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.

Once upon a time in the cinematic west, more particularly during the sixties, you had to be Italian and your first name preferably had to be Sergio in order to make the greatest Spaghetti Westerns of all time. There was the greatest Sergio of them all (Sergio Leone, creator of the "Dollars"-trilogy and "Once upon a time in the West") but there was also Sergio Corbucci who made the awesomely terrific "Django" and "The Great Silence", and last but not least there was Sergio Sollima who was responsible for "The Big Gundown" and its mega-cool sequel "Run Man Run". Unfortunately I haven't seen the original yet – it's hardly my fault Blue Underground opted to include only the sequel in the fabulous Spaghetti Western Collection DVD box – but the follow up is a vastly entertaining, fast-paced, refreshing, exhilarating and effectively light-headed western adventures and promptly became one of my new personal favorites in the genre. Tomas Milian is stupendous as usual depicting the witty and hyperactive petty criminal Manuel "Cuchillo" Sanchez who is literally always on the run; whether for his demanding fiancée who insists on getting married or – due to a series of unforeseen events – from a whole lot of bounty hunters, organized criminal gangs and Mexican army officers. After helping a Mexican revolutionist to escape from jail, Cuchillo receives some valuable information regarding the whereabouts of a treasure of $3.000.000 in gold. This money is meant to finance the Mexican Revolution, but obviously several parties are more than interested in stealing it and they're all short on Cuchillo's tail as he's the only one who can lead them to the exact location. This top-class Italian western is near damn perfect from every viewpoint. The typical "Viva La Revolution" theme is always present, but never obtrusively shoved down your throat like often the case in other westerns (for example "Bullet for the General") and actually the emphasis strangely enough lies on comedy and abrupt plot twists instead of on harsh fights until death. Cuchillo spends most of his time on screen either running (duh!) or captured by one of his many opponents and subjected to ingenious methods of torture, but his narrow escapes are even greater to behold. Despite the comical atmosphere, "Run Man Man" nevertheless contains large portions of violence (Cuchillo is an expert knife thrower) and typically wild Western shootouts in desolate areas. The musical scores, courtesy of both Bruno Nicolai and Ennio Morricone, are beyond genius. The title track can be found on YouTube and I'm really addicted to it.

"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.