The Hunting Party (1971)

I was watching an episode The Rifleman. It was directed by Don Medford.

"Who's that?" I thought.

I googled him.

Don Medford was a TV director who also directed a couple of movies one of which was The Hunting Party, a 1971 British/US co-production filmed in Spain. Oliver Reed is head of a large band of outlaws. They kidnap Candice Bergen because they think she's the schoolmarm and Oliver Reed wants her to teach him how to read. They don't say why he wants to become literate and I don't think school teachers in the Old West had any special skills back then. They knew how to read but I doubt they knew much about teaching.

Candice's wealthy impotent sadist husband (Gene Hackman) was out on a hunting trip with his business associates. He bought them each a high powered rifle with a long old-timey telescopic site that gives it a range of 800 yards. When they get word that his wife has been kidnapped, they go after them. They figure they'll find the band of outlaws and pick them off from a great distance so they can't shoot back.

The movie was lousily received. Everyone hated it. Starts with Oliver Reed and his friends cutting up a cow they killed. They eat raw meat fresh from the cow.

There's something they warn film students about. Don't use toy guns in your movies. That goes for airsoft guns and BB guns, too, although I've seen movies where people used them and they worked fine. But in this movie, the rifles with the long telescopic sites were obviously fake. They clearly didn't weigh anything. You could see that the barrels were light tubes rather than heavy gun barrels.

The gimmick with the rifles might have been better if they didn't all have one. They don't explain why Gene Hackman didn't simply kill Oliver Reed---he could have done it a couple of times but didn't bother.

There just wasn't much of a plot.

The emotionally repressed British and an American TV director tried to make their own overwrought Italian western, but it just wasn't in their nature.

You know how, in old episodes of Barnaby Jones they always tried to build up to a big dramatic conclusion and it never, ever came out anywhere near as good as they thought it would? Same thing here.