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2.0 out of 5 stars
BETWEEN GOD...: an overlong, tedious reworking of TREASURE ISLAND, August 19, 2010
This review is from: Euro Western Double Feature: Between God, The Devil & A Winchester (1963) / Boot Hill (1969) (DVD)
Several problems plague this overlong, tedious flick. For one, it takes an ideal premise and draws it out interminably as to make it excruciating. Also, your protagonists are a motley, poorly-rendered bunch for the most part.
The story is a basic rework of TREASURE ISLAND. Transpose a literary classic to a new genre, I get it. Should be fun, right? A boy whose family runs a boarding house discovers a treasure map hidden by a traveling bounty hunter. The boy, along with his own old uncle, a dapper caballero, and a wandering preacher, set out across the mountains to find the gold. They must fight off a gang of roving bandits as well as their own paranoia and suspicions of each other. The story seems to take forever to get started, and once the crew gets started on their trek to find the treasure, nothing really happens for the next hour til the inevitable showdown.
An action/adventure film like this that centers around a little boy is going to rise and fall on the performance of the boy, and here, young Humberto Sempere as Tony is sniveling, wide-eyed, unlikeable. Plus, he is voiced in a shrill, broad manner by an obviously adult female actor. That alone kills the vibe of the flick from the get-go. Similarly, the boy's uncle is given a "goofy" characterization which is truly grating. Among the other leads is the blank-faced American Richard Harrison as Pat the Preacher, who has very limited, Chuck Norris-esque range, and who doesn't even show up until 30 minutes into the show. The best of the cast is the super-classy, mucho macho Gilbert Roland. Imagine the Dos Equis Guy with a pencil-thin John Waters-style mustache and a gaudy vest, that's him! Roland is dignified and sympathetic in all his parts, and to this one he brings subtle shadings to a shady gunslinger that is at heart a decent man.
Aside from Roland's performance, the other part of the film I enjoyed is the initial setup featuring bounty killer Folco Lulli coming into town, scoping out his next mark, killing an informant and an outlaw along the way. Lulli's character, however is killed off pretty quickly, setting the scene for annoying Tony to find the map and begin the main thrust of the pic's story.
Maybe the original Italian cut of this film favors the actors better than the English dub, but even if that's so, you'd still have to deal with the tedious pacing and lack of action. For the English dub anyway, I call it a generous 5/10 stars.
Also known as GOD WAS IN THE WEST, TOO, AT ONE TIME. (Doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it?)
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2.0 out of 5 stars
2 1/2 Stars - Both films fail to live up to their possibilities, August 19, 2011
This review is from: Euro Western Double Feature: Between God, The Devil & A Winchester (1963) / Boot Hill (1969) (DVD)
Disclaimer: The prints of both these films that I viewed were from
20 Great Westerns: Heroes & Bandits. As such, I cannot comment on the audio or picture quality of the films as they appear on this Alpha Home Entertainment disc. My review concerns the entertainment value of the films only.
It seems like both of these films should be better than they are. There is some entertainment value here - mostly for Italian western junkies - but really, both these films are unremarkable.
'Between God, The Devil and a Winchester' (aka 'God Was in the West, Too, at One Time') stars the uber-suave Gilbert Roland as Juan Chasquisdo, a stand-in for Long John Silver, and Richard Harrison taking on the Doctor Livesey character in this adaptation of 'Treasure Island' set in the old west of the 1880's. The script follows the classic tale fairly close, with allowances for setting and time period, although there are a few other variations. Not knowing anything about the film before watching, it was a surprise when I recognized the source behind the film, and I still think it should have worked better then it did. Substitute a long wagon trek into forbidding mountains for the sea voyage, and Mexican bandits for the scurvy crew of pirates bidding their time to get their hands on a hidden treasure, and it should add up to fun diversion, Italian western style.
Somehow, though, the pay-off just isn't very exciting. By the time the final third of the film rolled around, it seemed as though the series of crosses, double-crosses and greedy motivations that highlighted the original story were flat and dutiful rather than suspenseful. Whether this had to do with familiarity or because the director lost control over the pacing, I can't be sure, though I suspect one part of it was the effort to remove some of the ambiguity from the Silver character. The intent is to keep the viewer guessing about Gilbert Roland, and whose side he's on, but in the end, he is much clearer morally than Long John ever was.
Gilber Roland is definitely the star here - he makes this role look effortless despite the scrambled storyline, and Raf Baldasarre has a minor but energetic role he gives his all toward. Others, including Harrison and Humberto Sempere as the Jim substitute, are average at best, which is pretty standard for these films. All in all, an interesting idea that fails to follow through.
'Boot Hill', on the other hand, is a generic story of an unscrupulous mining company trying to frighten honest, hardworking miners into selling their claims, and of the unlikely heroes that band together to save the common folks. What might lead one to believe that this effort could have been above average is the cast - Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer, Woody Strode, Lionel Stander, Victor Buono (Batman's King Tut), and a few other faces no doubt familiar to Italian western fans, such as Alberto Dell'Acqua and Luca Montefiori. Unfortunately, this film, like its companion, never comes together, despite its stable of competent actors.
At the request of an old friend, Terence Hill enlists the help of Bud Spencer to break the hold Buono and his gang have over a mining community. Along the way, Lionel Stander and Woody Strode, as part of a traveling circus, get drawn into the mix when Strode's young protege is murdered by the gang. In a unnecessarily complex ending, the miners, the circus performers and the two gunmen team-up to rid the county of Buono's influence, with predictable results.
What sinks this film is an over-reliance on the typecasting of the actors. Each and every one of the stars act exactly as you would expect them to if you had seen any other movie they were involved in. It's almost as if there wasn't a script at all, or only the bare outlines of one - the actors just played their roles as they'd done dozens of other times. To me, this takes away the strongest element of Italian filmmaking - the chance of completely bizarre scenarios and unexpected events popping up even in generic plots. Using the reputation of the actors as a shortcut to storytelling is one of the major problems with big-budget American films - Italian films from the sixties and seventies, even with their production problems, at least hold out the promise of originality. 'Boot Hill' (aka 'Trinity Rides Again' though that's disengenious at best - this isn't a Trinity film) seems uninspired and unoriginal even after discounting problems that plague most Italian Westerns (poor dubbing, questionable acting, convoluted scripts). Together with 'Between God, The Devil and a Winchester', these are below average films from the time and place, and are only recommended for Italian western enthusiasts who have seen most everything else.
This Alpha release list 73 minutes as the run time, so prospective buyers should be warned that _something_ is off-kilter here. The total run time for both these films should be closer to the three hour mark, as the versions of the two films that I watched were both over 90 minutes. The prints that are available on the '20 Great Western' compilation discs are poor, washed out, and full of artifacts, but are entirely watchable. That set, or
this one may make an attractive alternative to this Alpha release, which is more than likely taken from the same source as the compilation discs. Unfortunately, TGG, the makers of '20 Great' set, opted to cram five movies on each side of a disc, so pixellation problems are unavoidable.
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