Condenados a vivir

It's interesting how sometimes a director will make many movies throughout their career but only one will get noticed. Having looked at Joaquin Marchent's filmography it seems like most of his movies haven't been watched by many people on IMDb. I haven't seen any of his other movies either and probably never will but I enjoyed Cut Throats Nine a lot. The reputation that it has garnered is most likely due to it being probably the most violent and gruesome euro-western made at a time when a lot of them were getting made. But I would argue that the gore wasn't what makes the movie great and that it was a bit excessive. I'm not bothered by such things and it looks rather fake anyway but the insistence of adding gore by the producers cheapens the movie a bit. Then again maybe without it the movie wouldn't have developed a cult following and I would've never seen it.

What makes this movie special is just how dark it is. It's a snowy western just like The Great Silence but it's even more nihilistic than that movie was. Every character in Cut-Throats Nine apart from the lieutenant and his daughter is deplorable. You don't want any of them to survive yet they are the characters we as viewers follow for the whole movie. I find such movies fascinating but I can understand why some can't connect with them. On top of that, the soundtrack is very ominous and the atmosphere is top-notch. Everything adds up into making the film feel absolutely bleak and with no hope in sight. It's a great example of a euro-western that takes the genre and adds a few things on top to make it more interesting. In this case it's making it a survival movie with despicable characters. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes euro-westerns or hopeless cinema watches it even if they don't like gore as it's a very interesting and incredibly atmospheric western.

Intriguing, grim and gritty Spanish Western has a very harsh, uncompromising tone. Sgt. Brown (Claudio Undari), a cavalry officer, is escorting a sextet of lowlife criminals, all of them chained together, across rugged terrain to prison. As it turns out, he has more than one reason for being deeply committed to this task. Accompanying him is his daughter Sarah (beautiful Emma Cohen). However, a gang of bandits intervenes, and they end up having to make their journey on foot.

As the viewer may expect, the forceful personalities of these cretins ensure many angry confrontations along the way. A flop upon its original release, an enterprising distributor came up with the idea, upon re-releasing it, to punch it up by adding a lot of gory business, all of it quite effectively nasty, and providing theatre goers with cardboard masks that they could wear if they couldn't stomach this material. This really didn't help the movie either, but it did acquire a cult following nevertheless.

Making no clear distinctions between "good" and "bad" in terms of its characters, it comes up with a fairly surprising and sadistic twist at about the half way point, and is very compelling for its portrayal of human beings at the mercy of the elements. With exteriors filmed in the Aragonese Pyreneo region of Spain, the scenery is breathtaking and the winter atmosphere genuinely chilling in more ways than one. The characters are interesting and entertaining in their own sordid way, with the actors delivering convincing performances. The music by Carmelo A. Bernaola is good if repetitive, and the frequent use of flashbacks is arresting, with much use of freeze frames. The ending is effectively downbeat, too. The pacing is rather unhurried, yet there are always fine moments, especially around the 67 minute mark as one of the convicts is stumbling through the wilderness on his own.

Western fans looking for something dark, violent, and morally ambiguous might want to check this one out.

Seven out of 10.

Conedandos a vivir (1972) was and is marketed purely as a violent exploitation film. Viewers approach it that way and either find it terribly vacant and crude or enjoy those aspects of the movie that are hyped up by hucksters. As the euro-western was widely marketed as violent and cynical, this advertising tactic that often blinds viewers to what is actually occurring on-screen. This is unfortunate as this movie is actually a well thought out and decently executed western that provides the nihilistic capstone to an interesting series of Spanish westerns made in the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s. Viewed in that tradition, as the terminal point in a genre narrative that began much earlier in films like Joaquin Marchent's own El Sabor de la venganza (1963), it is a moving and fascinating movie.

Contrary to the reputation of the "Mediterranean westerns" made in Italy and Spain in the 1960s and 70s, these movies are not simply absurd and extreme distortions of the original American genre somewhat like Red River (1948) or Rio Bravo (1959) projected into a hall of mirrors. Instead of warped conventions without significance, these movies contained their own views of society and morality. Many of the westerns written or directed by Spaniards have a very interesting perspective of the nature of violence that is central to plot and character. Violence is a contagion that consumes everything and everyone in it's vicinity. In movies like El Hombre que mató a Billy el Niño (1967), El Sabor de la venganza (1963), or Garringo (1969) victims are transformed into victimizers through the alchemy of good intentions in a corrupt society. There is always a character who has a close personal relationship with the victim-turned-victimizer who both opposes the political corruption and also it's products, including their friend or brother/son. Outlaws are portrayed in bestial terms, a pack dominated by the most brutal one. These movies always end with an ambiguous sacrifice to necessity.

With Condenados a vivir, this formula reaches it's fullest development. Isolated in the wilderness, there is nothing to stall the corrosive assault of brutality. Every member of the group is degraded and virtually every on-screen character is dead by the final credits. Sarah Brown (Emma Cohen) is the only character who opposes this effect in any way, though her response is ambiguous as it involves a hopeless and absolute nihilism. In this series of movies, the typical genre ending of a shoot-out in the street or synonymous act becomes endlessly complicated. The exorcism of violence by violence must, according to the logic of these narratives, only perpetuate the contagion – an inescapable circularity.

This movie has a sort of resurrection of the dead hero in the manner of the Italian brand of western, but here it occurs in the delusions of an insane fugitive. However, whereas in the Italian movies this return-from-the-grave is followed by a sort of liberation of a community, in this movie this is only a guilt-ridden and confused hallucination.

As in most of these Spanish movies, the technical execution lags far behind the narrative sophistication. The "gore-effects" will strike you as laughable if you are in the right mood. However, all-in-all, this movie is a successful and sincere b-movie, and as such I recommend it. With El Sabor de la venganza, this is Joaquin Marchent's best western.

Top spaghetti western list http://imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=21849907

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For fanatics only (bottom of the barrel) http://imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=21849890

By 1972, the spaghetti western was already past its hay day and was looking for different ways, styles and themes to push the envelope. Cut-Throats Nine belongs to that small variety that brought horror sensibilities to the genre (like Sartana, Django the Bastard and others) but it also took it one step further. Whereas other westerns were content to be dark and brooding in an atmospheric kind of way, Cut-Throats is as violent and graphic as any Italian horror movie from the 70's.

The plot is minimal but quite good. For better or for worse, the director doesn't go for the psychological angle between captor and captives like Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur did, but instead focuses on the violence and nihilism that is the logical conclusion when nine ugly, dangerous criminals chained to each other are transported through the barren, desolate terrain to a nearby fort.

On the western front, Cut-Throats is as bleak and unforgiving as the gritty works of Sergio Corbucci minus the finesse and style of that great cinematician. The feeling is there though. The snowy, rocky landscape, the nihilistic, unredeemable characters, the grit and the violence. There are no heroes and cowboys with white hats here. If John Wayne were to set foot in the western universe Cut-Throats portrays, he would sooner pack his things and find a new hobby like sewing. Much like Hitchcock's Psycho, the person closer to what we could identify as the "hero" is burnt to a crisp 30 minutes in. That's where the movie ultimately succeeds. By being deprived of all certainty, you're left hanging there in the snow with a bunch of ugly cut-throats. Speaking of cutting throats, there's more: people get stabbed, intestines pour out, others are burnt alive, beaten mercilessly, nailed to hooks, get their brains blown out, corpses are burnt, legs are cut off. And with all the same graphic detail one would expect from a gruesome Italian horror from the likes of Fulci or Lenzi. Coupled with the general take-no-prisoners, mean-spirited air that permeates every minute, Cut-Throats is more likely to appeal to exploitation fans than the traditional western crowd.

Brutal, bleak and gory, this is an effective Spanish spaghetti western with no good guys at all. There is a hint at the start when we see the seven chain gang prisoners being led by the seeming good guy and his daughter, because counting up the procession, it is clear that the nine of the title includes them too. An engaging film, however desolate, but this is always going down all the way. There are one or two moments of respite but there are too many killings, a rape and hints of cannibalism, for this to be likely to have any happy ending. A rather good plot line, some excellent music, good photography in what looks like very difficult conditions in the mountains and yes, some really nasty killings.