LAST OF THE BADMEN (Italy, 1967)

Il tempo degli avvoltoi; Time of Vultures

D: Nando Cicero. P: Vico Pavoni. W: Fulvio Gicca Palli [as Fulvio Gicca]. Ph: Fausto Rossi. M: Piero Umiliani. St: George Hilton (Kitosch), Frank Wolff (Joshua Tracy), Pamela Tudor (Steffy Mendoza), Eduardo Fajardo (Don Jaime Mendoza), Franco Balducci (Francisco)

 

 

“What are you doing with Tracy … he’s just a rabid dog.”

While not exactly a prolific spaghetti-western figure, Fernando Cicero nevertheless directed a trio of films that have achieved a degree of esteem among the genre’s die-hard fans. Each features bankable Euro stars and is competently directed – the others are Red Blood, Yellow Gold, a generic Civil War treasure-hunt caper, and Twice a Judas, the plot of which is rooted in the well-worn Cain and Abel myth. Though Cicero was more comfortable directing commedia sexy, this film is distinctively dark and grungy. While Hilton flaunts his signature charm and guile (and sports snappy neck attire), its increasingly squalid scenario gifts Wolff free reign to penetrate layers of cackling villainy.[i]

 

 

An uneven narrative is triggered when serial womaniser Kitosch is caught in flagrante delicto with Steffy, the wife of his employer, ranch owner Don Jaime. Physically punished, Kitosch flees the ranch to the nearby town where he helps wicked outlaw Black Tracy evade would-be bounty killers. Now a fugitive, Kitosch chooses to ride with Tracy, but it soon becomes clear that his new companion is corrupted by vengeful notions – his wife, Trapps, has eloped with fellow outlaw Big John – and that his methods are as unpalatable as his mind is unstable.

 
Hilton’s swarthy appeal carries a relatively breezy, even comedic, first ten minutes until he crosses the threshold of his master’s bedroom. In revenge for his liaison with Steffy, Don Jaime brands Kitosch’s flesh and attempts to permanently enslave him on his ranch. (Strange indeed when one considers how troublesome the hero is.)

Kitosch has a knack for brutality, however, exemplified during an enterprising escape from his employer’s henchmen, while his deft knife-throwing saves the life of, and ingratiates himself with, the black-clad Tracy. Later Tracy presumes to teach Kitosch how to shoot – “A pistol is like a woman; if you hold it too tight then it’ll rebel” – but is upstaged by his apprentice’s dexterity with a six gun; Kitosch blasts away the sheriff’s badges that Tracy preserves as trophies.

 

 

 

In contrast to Kitosch’s sensuality, Wolff portrays Tracy as a tempestuous, sociopathic force in much the same manner as his Bill San Antonio in God Forgives, I Don’t. Here the stench of derangement is, perhaps, even more acute. His violent psyche is explained as an effect of epilepsy.[ii] (As Kitosch tells him, “Epilepsy’s a terrible thing, Tracy, makes you rotten inside.”) The level of savagery he unleashes is on a par with the most extreme in the genre. Trapps (Maria Grazia Marescalchi in a convincingly tormented performance), subsisting in a haunting, darkened saloon, is revealed to be suffering from damaged eyes and Tracy tortures her by holding a lantern close to her retinas. A sojourn in the desert is enlivened when Tracy beats Big John to a carriage of gold army ingots by firing grenades at his rival.

Other action scenes, however, are generally lacklustre, the film’s power found more in Wolff’s saturnine stillness, and the growing horror persuasively conveyed by Hilton. “For God’s sake, you’re insane”, cries Kitosch as the madman screws Big John’s hands into the door of his house, which he has wrenched from the building and obsessively transported with him on his wagon – a modified hearse.

Things come full circle for Kitosch in the final scenes. The film’s principal characters are united when Tracy spots a lucrative opportunity. In the final reckoning, Fajardo loses his thin-lipped spitefulness, while English rose Pamela Tudor displays the necessary histrionics of a damsel in distress. The narrative may flounder at times, but the festering nihilism in Wolff’s characterisation sustains a welcome degree of eccentricity, complemented by Umiliani’s atypical score. Clark Hodgkiss

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[i] Hilton would play a hero with the same name in José Luis Merino’s Kitosch, the Man Who Came from the North.

[ii] This would not be the only time epilepsy would be depicted as the cause of psychotic behaviour – see also Tomas Milian’s turn as epileptic albino O’Hara in Death Sentence. It is a matter of speculation whether this is ignorance on behalf of the era’s film community, a quick exploitation gimmick or a fair reflection of 19^th-century thinking.