It was more than thirty years ago, I was looking at a radical film journal, maybe Jump Cut, [I think it was CineAction!] which had an article on Spaghetti Westerns. Nearly all of them were made by Italian Communists.
There was a still from one movie. It was a guy who looked like a movie cowboy, unshaven and dirty in a cowboy outfit, his back to a wall hiding from something around the corner. But he was holding a World War One era .32 automatic. For some reason, I found that appealing. I've seen westerns all my life and never liked them. Everyone having the same big, stupid-looking gun was one reason.
So, in Joe Kidd, Clint Eastwood brandishes a Mauser semi-automatic pistol first made in 1896.
The movie had a slow built-up. They could have gotten to the point faster, but that may be just me. My attention span, or at least my patience, has dwindled. It was 90 minutes. It wasn't over long.
Watching people get shot with a different kind of gun was less of a thrill than I thought it would be, but they made good use of it.
Robert Duvall as a rich guy. He and his friends/henchmen are armed with what were then the most advanced firearms--rifles with a longer range and the Mauser pistol--when they go out to murder local Hispanics demanding their ancestral land back.
Available on Movieland Tv.
The Hunting Party
Reminded me a little of The Hunting Party which came out a year earlier, the British answer to the Spaghetti Western----a US-British co-production filmed in Spain. They should have filmed in the UK. I've seen British farming towns in movies that would have been interesting in a western.
Rich guy Gene Hackman provides his friends with really long-range rifles with telescopic sights for a hunting trip. When his wife (Candice Bergen) is kidnapped by a British-led gang of illiterates who think she can teach them to read, they go after them instead, picking them off from far enough away that they can't shoot back.
That movie was just awful.
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