Les colts au soleil

I would never put paella westerns and Louis L'amour in the same sentence, let alone in a film, as L'amour books are traditional as it gets, but it works here. From the tense intro till the end, the film lives up to the excellence of the book, capturing the mystery, the characters quite well. The landscape lends itself to the suspense - and the action is gritty and exciting, especially at the end ( the ranch in the cave is well-imagined.)

Though there's action, it never overrides the narrative, and the focus is on Richard Crenna, looking cool, all dressed in black looking like Johnny Cash, who has lost his memory after an attempt on his life. From there, with the help of the underrated Stephen Boyd, he tries to learn who he is, and for his efforts he gets a passel load of bullets heading his way.

Great cast - Farley Granger, Rosanna Schiaffino and the hottie villainess Patty Shepherd. - great action. A bit confusing at times, but amnesiac films - like Bourne identity - tend to have this streak, and you have to sit it out and be patient and you'll soon get the answers. Maybe the dialogue could've been sharper, more clearer, however, it is a solid western that should get more attention.

Four years before this film, Peter Collinson had directed the hugely successful ITALIAN JOB featuring a terrific European ensemble that included Michael Caine and Raf Vallone, and was full of humorous heist action.

Sadly, he did not manage to whip up the same level of inspiration here, and the highly original and irreverent sequences in ITALIAN JOB make way in THE MAN CALLED NOON to a ponderous narrative occasionally jolted out of its snail pace by shootouts, and a contrived dialogue ripping off such quality Westerns as Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME in the WEST, Fred Zinnemann's HIGH NOON, Nicholas Ray's JOHNNY GUITAR, among others. Even UN FLIC, the 1972 Jean-Pierre Melville-directed French thriller featuring Alain Delon and Richard Crenna, made a contribution with the model train sequence in which Crenna also runs around the roof (thankfully without the helicopter).

Acting is generally substandard. Crenna never amounted to much as an actor. Here, he suffers from amnesia, keeps giving himself the name of a man who exists and Boyd seeks. Crenna's good looks are consistently emphasized, and he often seems either perplexed or like he has just spotted another killer. The film opens with him getting shot and escaping from a pinned down, under fire position, to a train that just happens to be blowing its horn to leave the tiny town's station. In the process, the injured Crenna eludes and flees more than 10 heavily armed men seeking him and makes off on the train where a strangely solicitous Stephen Boyd helps him evade.

That is where movie producer Boyd comes in. 14 years earlier, Boyd had memorably played the evil Roman consul Masala in BEN-HUR, but the sole connection is that here he too does quite a bit of horseriding. By 1973, Boyd was a waning star playing a pawn on the film's chessboard, of which two different sets surface at the end with Farley Granger deciding the moves as Judge Niland, who also masters rifle shooting, thereby sentencing no end of lives.

Two beautiful females appear: spaghetti beauty Rosa Schiaffino as the white dressed good woman Fan Davidge, and Patty Shepard as the black-dressed baddie Peg Cullane. Neither is particularly necessary for the action, but obviously the film needed female presences to be box office viable.

Plenty of breathtaking landscape shots, lovingly filmed trains arriving at stations, make THE MAN CALLED NOON rather easy on the eye, especially when the musical score is not too loud and modern to fit the action in the late 19th Century West.

Rather mediocre film. I doubt I will rewatch it. 6/10.

Despite the presence of Richard Crenna, "The Man Called Noon" is a real obscurity - I couldn't find a listing for it in any of my movie reference books, and I have a lot in my personal library! But it didn't take long watching it to figure out why it is unknown today. Now, I will say that the director manages to pump in a lot of atmosphere into just about every scene, and occasionally there is some decent action. However, the movie is all the same a tough slog. It is remarkably slow for a European western, with the movie remaining at a near standstill for long periods. The screenplay also suffers with the amnesia subplot - not much is done with it, and what there is has a strong degree of extreme familiarity. No freshness there. Also, there are some strange changes in tone - one scene the movie is trying to be a gritty western, and then it suddenly changes into a western with a more epic tone. In short, the movie is a real mess, and even fans of Euro westerns might be squirming in their seats.

Have you ever awakened from a vivid dream that quickly fades? That is exactly how I would describe my viewing experience with " The Man Called Noon." The story of a gunslinger with amnesia is extremely vague. You know it all is leading somewhere, but you have too little information to care about the characters. What you do get is a showcase for stunt falls, some truly excellent photography and memorable locations. What you don't get is enough character development to comprehend the motive behind all the gunslinging chaos. Rosanna Schaffino's magnificent brown eyes are more interesting than most of the characters. Richard Crenna is no Clint Eastwood, and since the "Dollar Westerns" preceeded Noon, it is easy to see why "The Man Called Noon" is so obscure. I would describe this as difficult to sit through, difficult to understand, but worth seeing once for the unbelievably stunning photography. MERK.

Despite the fact that Stephen Boyd starred in a couple of the most famous films ever made, he really was a singularly mediocre actor and that is pretty clearly illustrated in this hotch-potch of a western. Here he ("Rimes") finds himself assisting the forgetful "Noon" (Richard Crenna) to track down who he is, where he is from and just how, exactly, he found himself in this amnesiac state. During moments of lucidity, "Noon" recalls a cache of gold - so the two, along with the feisty "Fan" (Rosanna Schiaffino) set off to find it before nasty "Judge Niland" (Farley Granger) and his slightly do-lally pal "Peg" (Patty Shepard) do them all in. Peter Collinson has done an OK job with this. These multi-national efforts were never as good on screen as they might have looked on paper. Crenna is efficient, though not spectacular and there is some nice cinematography to accompany a jaunty score from Luis Bacalov. Nothing new here and not a film I could say I shall ever watch again.