Gone with the West

When an innocent convict (James Caan) is released from prison in the Southwest he teams-up with an AmerIndian woman (Stefanie Powers) to exact vengeance on a town of sadistic revelers in the desert. Aldo Ray plays the sinister town boss, Robert Walker Jr. the weary sheriff and Sammy Davis Jr. a black-clad gunslinger.

"Gone with the West" has a strange history: It was actually shot in 1969 under the working title "Man without Mercy," but not released until 1974-1975. This explains how scenes from the movie were available for use in the theater sequence of "Messiah of Evil" (1973). A reedited version with new music and additional scenes (a new intro & conclusion set in modern times) was released in the late 70s under the name "Little Moon and Jud McGraw" wherein Caan's character, Jebediah Kelsey, was changed to Jud McGraw. I viewed the original "Gone with the West" version.

The movie SEEMS like a serious Western with the typical sadism of Spaghetti Westerns (for example, the opening features a woman being raped with a town mob heartily enjoying the spectacle), but the goofy jazz/rock score keys off that it's supposed to be satirical. If there's any doubt, the ending scene tells all. Speaking of the music, it's akin to the groovy rock in low-budget biker flicks, e.g. "The Cycle Savages" (1969), except that a great acoustic piece surfaces occasionally, similar to something Heart would do back then.

When I discerned that the film wasn't to be taken too seriously I started to chuckle with it, a little anyway, and was entertained by several sequences, like the knock-down drag-out brouhaha of two women, Sammy Davis Jr.'s deadpan gunfighter and the guy humorously singing "Abide with Me" deadpan, as well as the over-the-top hellish close.

Unfortunately, the editing is incoherent, like whoever put it together was on acid. Not to mention there's zero meaningful dialogue with Powers babbling in an AmerIndian language the whole time (or was it Spanish?). So, there are items to appreciate in this eccentric Western, but you have to persevere through its outlandishness and defects.

The film runs 1 hour, 32 minutes, and was shot in Las Vegas with the title sequence shot at Vasquez Rocks, California, just north of Los Angeles in the high country.

GRADE: C-

This has to be one of the worst movies ever! How did it take three people to write a story with nearly no dialog and very little plot? How did anyone get talked into financing this bomb? How did they manage to get James Caan and SAMMY DAVIS JR.! to appear in this thing? I think this movie gave Sammy Davis Jr. cancer. He probably never let Sinatra or Dean Martin know he was in this thing. It is that utterly bad. It is more confusing than some bizarre Fellini flick. I watched the whole thing and I have NO idea what it is about, just a collection of scenes that don't add up to a story. I don't know what any of it means - the cockfighting, the woman and little kid getting shot, the two hookers (?) getting into a fight, the wrestling match in the bar (which is perpetually in a fight scene), the cowboy singing 'Abide With Me' every so often. Weird, weird, weird. Maybe it would make sense if you watched it on LSD, since it was apparently written under that influence. I can't recall another movie which has left me feeling so stunned, like 'What the HECK was that?' No wonder it's in the public domain; nobody would have spent the few dollars to keep the copyrights going. Wow. This whole movie makes no sense whatever.

Though this film seems to have had a cute idea for a tongue-in-cheek western send-up at its heart, the result was so bad it reminds one of the cheesy pornographic films from the same era. Surely the production values are that low, and and as others have noted, the editing was such as should have earned any film-school student a failing grade. How a name-brand a cast like this one ever got involved with something so poor is to be wondered at. Perhaps no less wondrous is why really awful films like these get released on DVD while so many other infinitely more redeeming ones still fail to see the light of day (I personally am still waiting for "The Secret of Santa Vittoria" with Anthony Quinn). Rest assured, younger viewers, that this disaster is far, far below even the average quality of films of its time. Speaking of which, the 1975 release date cited in these pages cannot be accurate because the Oldsmobile Cutlass so prominently featured in the beginning of the film (yet another waste of otherwise perfectly good celluloid in connection with this movie) was not on the market until the 1978 model year.

Ex-convict James Caan is released from prison and sets out to exact some long overdue vengeance on Aldo Ray, the man who murdered his family years before and apparently the rest of the town as well.

There's some trashy fun at first but things run out of steam pretty quick and never recover.

A paper thin story, the obnoxious free-wheeling 1970's style direction, and the bad funk score are all pretty off-putting, as is the terrible performance by Stephanie Powers, who looks like Johnny Depp in Benny & Joon and is so verbally challenged she makes Tonto look like a radio talk show host!

The great Sammy Davis Jr. is sadly wasted in this. His leather-clad gunfighter character was the most entertaining thing in the movie and really deserved a better script!

Rebecca: This is so bad it's almost good.

Enid: This is so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again.

"Gone With the West" (a/k/a "Little Moon and Old Jug or Jud"), is a James Caan-Sammy Davis Jr. western best described as "The Rat Pack on LSD". The cast includes "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.". It is a horrible western, made even worse by the condition of the print they used to make the DVD (a 2005 release by Mill Creek Entertainment), but it does feature one of the most intense cat-fights in cinema history.

Old Jug McGraw (Caan) and April Dancer are sent to the town of Black Miller by Mr. Waverly to investigate a Thrush plot led by a former Green Beret sergeant. There's opium dealers too, a lot of dogs, and a woman named Billie, who's kinda purdy. Everything gets straightened out, though I just watched the whole movie and I couldn't tell you how.