Les impitoyables

I bought this DVD for $3 in a bargain bin. I was expecting a horrid movie with an outside shot at "so bad it's funny", but was pleasantly surprised by it.

The plot was actually OK. The idea was good and there were a couple of interesting twists. On the bad side, the movie was poorly made, the style was completely ripped off from the spaghetti westerns, and some of the acting was terrible. Still worth a viewing, though.

I give it a 8/10 for plot, 5/10 for acting and dialogue, and 3/10 for production values. Because the plot is the most important thing (are you listening George Lucas?), I give it an overall rating of 6/10.

A preacher (Lee Van Cleef) is gunned down by a cutthroat gang (leading Jack Palance) . The son (Leif Garret) of a Saloon girl (Sybil Danning) is looking for the priest's brother , an ex-gunfighter (again Van Cleef) . The gunman seeks vengeance on the evil men who murdered him . Lee Van Cleef is better in the two first films from ¨Sabata¨ trilogy directed by Frank Kramer or Gianfranco Parolini , (the third was starred by Yul Brynner) than here . These movies are enjoyable , full of gadgets , imagination , with enough budget and produced by Alberto Grimaldi (successful producer of Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy) , here the producers are Menahem Golan and Yoran Globus (Cannon Productions) but in short budget and being middlingly directed by Gianfranco Parolini or Frank Kramer.

The picture displays action , gun-play , showdown , and drama but badly narrated ; besides , being in minimum budget and wasted casting . The movie has an awful cinematography and disappointing musical score . Jack Palance (recently deceased) as the exaggerated band leader is overacting , as usual , he plays a megalomaniac nasty in an overdone as well as excessive interpretation . There appears Cody Palance , Jack Palance's son (he had another daughter actress named Holly Palance , too) , unhappily , he early died . Richard Boone is underestimated in a minor role , in spite of getting a long career in classic Westerns . The teen singer Leif Garret as a dumb adolescent is mediocre , he played with Lee Van Cleef another spaghetti Western in similar style : ¨Kid vengeance¨ , being his maxim feat the acting as secondary in ¨Outsiders¨ (by Francis Ford Coppola) , later his career really failed . The motion picture was appallingly directed by Gianfranco Parolini who used the pseudonym of Frank Kramer . He began directing muscle-men epics as ¨Rocha¨, ¨The Macabeos¨ with Brad Harris and ¨The ten gladiators¨ with Dan Davis and Gianni Rizzo , Parolini's usual actor . After that , he continued with ¨commissioner X¨ series with Tony Kendall , fantastic genre with ¨Three supermen¨ and warlike movie as ¨5 per l'Inferno¨ with Gianni Garco (Sartana) and Nick Jordan . His first Western was ¨Johnny West¨ and later on , he directed the ¨Sabata trilogy¨ . Rating : Frustating , far fetching and uninspired Western .

The spaghetti western is/was a very specific genre, and by the standards of the day, they were a huge departure. The first several - A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad and The Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, to name a few - all in the unique hands of director Sergio Leone - are classics. Those that came after - including this one, Diamante Lobo (God's Gun) - not so much. The problem starts with the script, which leaves a lot to be desired. In Leone's films, he realized that he was working with a lot of actors for whom, however good they might or might not be, English was not their first language, if in fact they even spoke it at all. So he wisely devised an approach that required very little dialogue, depending mainly on action, atmosphere, style and - yes, violence. A lot of it. In Leone's hands, this combination spoke volumes. When it came to Gianfranco Parolini (aka Fred Kramer), the magic touch just wasn't there. For Diamante Lobo/God's Gun, the script was just awful - clichéd situations, cheesy dialogue, bad continuity. This saddled some of Hollywood's most reliable actors with a difficult assignment - making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. To a great extent, they were constrained by the director, and they fell back, as actors will, on their shtick, to get them through. For some (Sybil Danning, Jack Palance, Leif Garrett), it worked better than others (Lee Van Cleef, Richard Boone). For Van Cleef, the spaghetti western was familiar territory. But playing sort of against type in such familiar surroundings - good an actor as he was - just doesn't ring quite true. Boone, in one of his last films and probably already in poor health, in addition to being miscast, was just plain disappointing. Palance chews up the scenery, as he was wont to do in many films before and after - too broad, and yet it worked. Garrett, one of Hollywood's most promising young actors at the time, hit most of the right notes. Danning - well, she didn't have much to do, but she handled it quite well. The production values were inadequate. The town looked very well turned out for a dusty old stage stop. The post production just made things worse - bad dubbing, in some cases laughable voice replacement, second-rate scoring, editing that worked against the script (although perhaps in spite of it - who knows?). In short, there was a film in there somewhere, but it didn't have a chance to show itself. Two final thoughts: Although Van Cleef was a veteran of the genre, he wasn't the best choice for role(s). Leif Garrett was quite good when allowed to be. Too many reviewers just hate on child actors as a matter of course. And quite a few deserve it. They may be cute, but they are not good. But some are genuinely talented. Garrett was among them until the music thing overtook him. One can only wonder what might have happened had he not gone the teen idol path. As an actor, he sure had the chops.

The strangest thing of all about this terrible western is that while it has the look feel and especially the SOUND (loud, overdone) of a spaghetti western, most of the talent involved in the top positions were not European, including the director. Also, the three male leads did not sound right. The lead Lee van Cleef, sounded like himself most of the time , but Jack Palance and Richard Boone were dubbed. This is especially clear with Richard Boone who has a very distinctive voice. If someone out there can tell me why you would dub a distinctive sounding American actor's voice into English, please tell me. I liked the plot twist of the twin brother but this is a bad movie. Enough said!

I don't suppose many Westerns were made in Israel, but this seems to be the most famous. It looks like they've gone for the 'Spaghetti Western' look rather than the conventional and so should appeal to those who like those movies. Well....if they can get past the terrible direction, wonky camera-work, and Leif Garrett's acting.

Van Cleef plays a preacher(looking like Satan) who is gunned down in cold blood by Palance's vicious gang. Garrett, who witnesses the event is struck dumb and heads off to Mexico to find Van Cleef's twin brother, a top gunman who vowed to his brother he would never kill with a gun again. Van Cleef heads back to avenge his brother's death, but tries to do so in a manner that doesn't involve shooting them all.

There's clearly a good Western here, but it's lost beneath the ineptitude of the film makers. That said, Van Cleef's twin performance is excellent, and Palance hams(pun not intended) it up like only he can. 5/10