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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"You're time's up when I say it's up", February 15, 2006
This review is from: Macho Callahan / Movie [VHS] (VHS Tape)
It's hard to decide where to start describing this movie. A man tricked into becoming a soldier in the union army (Janssen) attempts to escape the prison camp he's in. The first time is a failure and so the movie begins. He does 30 days in "the box" and tells the jailer his time was up "three days ago". Janssen (Macho) does manage to escape on his next attempt. This man has had all he can take of what life has dished out to him. That's the only reason I can think of why he would kill a man (Carradine) over a bottle of champagne. Carradine and Jean Seberg had just been married. She witnesses his death from the second story of their honeymoon suite. The marshall of the town decides Macho acted in self defense but Seberg goes after him and offers a sizeable reward. The ending is sad and ironic but there aren't many good westerns with happy endings.
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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Too flawed to be satisfying, May 15, 2001
This review is from: Macho Callahan / Movie [VHS] (VHS Tape)
I was persuaded to watch MACHO CALLAHAN because of the movie's decent cast (David Janssen, Jean Seberg, Lee J. Cobb, David Carradine), and it's plot (the frequently-used but still reliable scenario of a wronged man seeking revenge). Unfortunately, the film is lacking in several ways. Janssen plays a Civil War P.O.W. whose situation can be blamed on the underhanded Cobb. He busts out of a Confederate military prison (in one of the film's few good scenes), intent on tracking down his quarry. But that storyline - which is the selling point of the movie - ends (rather abruptly) midway through the picture. The rest of the film deals with the consequences of Janssen gunning down a newlywed (Carradine), and his wife's (Seberg) desire to see Janssen dead. Credibility is strained to the breaking point when Seberg begins to fall in love with Janssen almost immediately after he's brutally raped her! Some really bad dialogue doesn't help, either. In a scene that's supposed to be tender, Janssen tries expressing his feelings to Seberg by saying: "Never learned no readin'. So I got no idea what you're supposed to say when you're like this. I know you're supposed to say somethin'. Some damn thing like 'you got pretty eyes', or somethin'. I know that." Yikes! The apparent intent was to show how a good woman can change a bad man...but it's handled in such a fashion as to make it seem unlikely at best, and utterly implausible at worst. A few scenes indicate that the film might not have had the biggest of budgets. When Seberg is confronted by a bear protecting her cub, it's obvious that Momma Bear is a guy in a bear suit! Fast editing tries to disguise the fact, but it's still noticeable. (Quick note: Janssen, in a rare act of compassion, plans to take the cub where it can be cared for, after declaring that the young animal can't make it on it's own. But when a posse starts to close in, the cub is promptly abandoned). All in all, MACHO CALLAHAN is somewhat like a jigsaw puzzle that hasn't been pieced together properly. Several scenes start and end too abruptly, without the benefit of appropriate transitions. You get the feeling that the filmmakers have left out a few things that would have made the movie flow better. Despite this, the film isn't a total bomb. The opening scenes convincingly depict the deplorable conditions of a Civil War prison, and the break-out is rousing. MACHO CALLAHAN is watchable, but it has too many elements going against it to be recommended.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
I don't wanna be.. a Macho Callahan, August 26, 2011
This review is from: Macho Callahan / Movie [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Bernard L. Kowalski is best known for directing 25 episodes of TV's THE REBEL (with Nick Adams) and as co-owner of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and executive producer of BARETTA. In his grim Trans-Mississippi Civil War era western, MACHO CALLAHAN is a man held prisoner in a hellish concentration camp after he's tricked into joining the Confederacy and goes AWOL. He escapes his brutal captors, then hunts down and kills the dude in yellow shoes who, for a $25 payout, bamboozled him into signing enlistment papers.
Callahan also shoots a woman's husband over a bottle of champagne, and she posts a $1600 dead or alive reward on his head. When this determined gal tracks him into the wilderness, they have a knock-down fight that leaves both bloodied, after which he forces himself upon her. Thus begins an unlikely love that ends when several bounty hunters corner them. A strange, gritty, slow-paced western of only mild interest.
(Watch for former Good Morning America host Joan Lunden's cameo as a very young saloon girl!)
Parenthetical number preceding title is a 1 to 20 IMDb viewer poll rating.
(4.9) Macho Callahan (1970) - David Janssen/Jean Seberg/Lee J. Cobb/Pedro Armendáriz Jr./David Carradine/Bo Hopkins/James Booth/Anne Revere/Richard Anderson/Diane Ladd/Matt Clark/James Gammon (uncredited: Joan Lunden)
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