ANTES LLEGA LA MUERTE (Centauro Films, PEA, 1964)

I sette del Texas (IT); Seven from Texas (US) 

D: Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent. P: Félix Durán Aparicio. W: Joaquin Luis Romero Marchent, Federico de Urrutia, Manuel Sebares. Ph: Rafael Pacheco, Fausto Zuccoli. M: Riz Ortolani. St: Paul Piaget (Bob Carey), Claudio Undari/Robert Hundar (Ringo), Gloria Milland (Mary), Fernando Sancho (Tomaso), Jesús Puente (Clifford) 

 

 

The western was up and walking, if not running, in Europe well before Sergio Leone’s intervention. Romero Marchent was the most proficient of the early practitioners, and this was his most personal project. Adhering closely to Hollywood traditions, as did all pre-Leone European westerns, it packs melodrama, revenge, greed, treachery and tragedy into two covered wagons on a life-or-death trek across the badlands of Almería and environs north. 

Many aspects in the story of Bob Carey, a pistolero fresh out of jail, who helps escort his old flame and her new husband cross-country, dogged all the way by the vengeful brothers of the man he was forced to kill, will resonate with students of the American western. The reluctant fast draw and the brothers who won’t forgive derive from The Gunfighter; the volatile group dynamics resemble Garden of Evil, The Last Wagon, The Deadly Companions, the films of Hawks, Mann and Boetticher; a celebration in a military fort pays homage to Ford; there is even a large-scale Indian assault on another stockade that could have been ripped from any number of frontier epics. The director, an earnest admirer of the American masters, assembles these elements with confidence and affection (he could have dispensed with the comical Chinese cook, whose function is largely to drop in an “old Chinese proverb” every now and again). 

 

 

But the crux of the drama is a mission of mercy, and this was culled from Romero Marchent’s own family history: Mary, like the director’s mother, has a brain tumour, a fact her doctor and her husband conceal from her. (She attributes her discomfort to a phantom pregnancy.) Clifford hopes a surgeon in Laredo may be able to save her, and sells his property to finance the expedition. Among the hired hands are Tomaso and Dan (Beni Deus), two inveterate gamblers, and three shifty gunmen, led by the weaselly Jess (Raf Baldassarre). Along the way they pick up Bob, wounded in an ambush by Ringo and his brothers that leaves two of them dead. Ringo, nursing bullet wounds in both hands, tags along – “I’d like to be there when Carey dies.” 

 

 

While it has its share of cold-blooded chancers, the film radiates compassion for its beleaguered heroine (as it ought to, given she was effectively a stand-in for Romero Marchent’s madre). This is generated mostly by Gloria Milland’s unaffected performance, as well as the ameliorative effect of Mary’s predicament and bearing, plus that of her stalwart husband, on those around her. As the wagons roll, Romero Marchent steers the principals towards redemption and repentance, particularly Ringo (the choice of his name, associated with John Wayne’s prototypical good-badman in Stagecoach – can hardly have been coincidental). Undari alternated heroic with villainous characters in his Euro-western career, but was always best in the grey area in between, as here. The pace of Ringo’s own journey, towards a place where he can respect Bob, his former enemy, never feels forced.  

As much as he was an innovator, Romero Marchent was no iconoclast. He chose to embrace inherited cultural traditions, not subvert them. Antes llega la muerte is a celebration of fortitude, selflessness and stoicism rather than ruthlessness, machismo (present in smaller doses) and the mercenary instinct that characterised Euro-westerns after Leone. It is significant that Fernando Sancho, for example, plays a loveable rogue rather than an outright bastardo, sheepishly retrieving his winnings from his dead friend’s pocket during the Apache attack, the pair having bet on who would be killed first. (Sancho’s typecasting as a swaggering brigand began the same year in Sergio Corbucci’s Minnesota Clay.) 

 

 

If the film has a soft centre, it is encased in a hard shell. As the trip becomes increasingly and convincingly arduous – registering the bleakness as well as the beauty of Spain’s desert regions, as well as the Sierra Morena and Picos de Europa ranges – Romero Marchent is unsparing of his characters, and not merely those one would expect to see killed off. For a film so unashamedly sentimental, the denouement, in its way, is as brutally ironic as they come.[1]

Kevin Grant

---

[1] The film’s most common English title, Seven from Texas, a translation of the Italian, is a misnomer, obviously trading on the popularity of The Magnificent Seven. The number of the group fluctuates, starting with 11, and only for part of the journey are there seven travellers. Moreover, they are bound for Texas, not from there. The Spanish title, translating as “before death comes”, gives a better sense of the urgency of the mission