THE TRAMPLERS (IT-FR 1965)

Gli uomini dal passo pesante

D: Albert Band, ‘Anthony Wileys’ [Mario Sequi]. P: Albert Band. W: Albert Band, Ugo Liberatore. Ph: Alvaro Mancori. M: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. St: Gordon Scott (Lon Cordeen), Joseph Cotten (Temple Cordeen), James Mitchum (Hoby Cordeen), Ilaria Occhini (Edith Wickett), Franco Nero (Charley Garvey)

“Cordeen family’s like an apple split in two – one half sweet, the other rotten”

Like Band’s subsequent and broadly similar production The Hellbenders, this film posits a family feud as an analogy for the festering tensions in reconstruction-era America. Here again is Joseph Cotten teetering on the precipice of hysteria as a domineering patriarch and Confederate die-hard, pursuing a private war that divides the loyalties of his sons.

Based on Will Cook’s 1958 novel Guns of North Texas, Band’s second European western as director is a rough equivalent of such melodramatic US features as Broken Lance and The Halliday Brand.[1] Temple Cordeen’s worldview reflects his belief in the racial and social superiority of the slave-owning Southern aristocracy. Returning from the Civil War – it goes without saying he does not accept defeat – he is none too pleased at the incursion of Yankee troublemakers on his home turf, lynching a slave-rousing newspaperman in the main street of Elk Crossing in the opening scene.

Whereas three of Temple’s boys are chips off the old concrete block, young Hoby is more sheepish, and prodigal son Lon outright defiant, refusing Temple’s order to scare off sister Bess’s suitor, the ‘lower class’ rancher Charley Garvey (Nero’s first western role, and a forgettable one). Instead, Lon helps the couple abscond, attends their hurried wedding and helps out on a trail drive to sell Charley’s cattle. Temple sends in his attack dogs...

Lon is noble to the (sweet apple) core, in spite of efforts by the script to portray him as a more complex character, torn between affection for his father and gut-level egalitarianism. Scott makes a solid hero, but Lon’s dilemma is not as engrossing as that of his younger sibling Hoby. Initially timid and self-effacing (“He’s got some old woman in him”, despairs his father), he becomes – after off-screen tribulations that cost him an arm – boozy and hard-bitten, not above shooting wounded men in the back. Mitchum gives a more assured performance than he had in his previous European western, the Band-Corbucci collaboration Massacre at Grand Canyon, but Hoby’s story arc is curtailed by the director’s focus on the more conventional figure of Lon, first in line to the Cordeen throne.

There are other elements that suggest a more thoughtful picture beneath the surface, such as the position of women in Southern society. The Cordeen females are restricted to the upper floor of the manor by their paterfamilias, whose name alone signifies his implacability. (The house is the former residence of another tyrant, the famous Villa Mussolini near Rome, making one of its earliest appearances in the genre.) They don’t take this meekly. Temple’s wife secretly briefs Lon against him, and both his daughters break away from the family fold. Then there is Edith, daughter of the murdered journalist, who returns to town determined to bring Temple to justice, by legal means or otherwise.

Band apprenticed in the cutting rooms at Warners and Pathé and tutored under John Huston, assisting on The African Queen and adapting The Red Badge of Courage. Something of a jack of all trades, by his own admission he never quite mastered directing. He may not have intuited where the plot’s real interest lay but he does a decent enough job here, augmented by Mancori’s dust-coloured photography. (This was one of the first films shot at Mancori’s Elios western village, erected in 1963.) The action scenes lack flair but are surprisingly violent, and the integration of stock footage of Argentine cattle is skilful, perhaps testament to Band’s beginnings as an editor.

The climax aspires to tragedy, with Lon and Hoby, holed up in a hotel, shooting it out with their siblings. These are thin characters, however, and their fates barely register, unlike those of Hoby, his internal conflict resolved at the point of dying, or Temple, driven senseless by the destruction of his brood. Lon, of course, is the last man standing, and vows to redeem the Cordeen brand.

The apostrophising of Southern honour would continue in The Hellbenders, Requiescant and other Euro-westerns – unless Giuliano Gemma was the hero, in which case a more positive image of the Confederate fighting man would prevail. Kevin Grant

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[1] Mario Sequi’s name was probably attached purely for the film to qualify as Italian – and thus achieve tax perks. Band was credited as co-director, with Sergio Corbucci, on 1964’s Massacre at Grand Canyon. Band was the producer but it is far from clear how much footage he shot and how great was the contribution of Corbucci