Spaghetti Westerns by Howard Hughes

and sheriffs’ posses and are saved by the army from a bandit gang, until finally their goal, the Hondo River, is in sight. But they are almost robbed by a beggar and one of the sons rapes and murders an Indian girl. The sons have been at each others’ throats throughout and this atrocity is the last straw. In a final shootout, all the brothers are left dead or dying, while Clare has pneumonia and Jonas is mortally wounded. Even worse, Jonas makes the horrible discovery that it has all been for nought. The coffin contains the corpse of an executed bandit. The money has been mistakenly buried by the Union army.
Background
     
    An audacious change of pace for Corbucci following the madness of Django and comic strip action of Navajo Joe , The Hellbenders , an anti-racist, anti-militarist diatribe, is a cross between a mission/heist movie (will they deliver the cash-laden hearse to the rebels?) and a lamentation of the South’s fate following the Civil War. Jonas and his three sons are used throughout to represent different aspects of the Confederacy (greed, compassion, jealousy, racism) while the coffin and the mock deceased jokingly stands for the South itself (hoping one day to ‘rise again’). Even more disrespectfully, Corbucci has the dead soldier’s wife impersonated by a prostitute.
    The best performance of the film obviously comes from the evertalented Joseph Cotten. Formerly of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre Project, and involved in milestones such as Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Third Man (1949), Cotten must have wondered what the hell had happened when he found himself in Spain making Spaghetti Westerns. Jonas is the most complex character in the movie, completely besotted with ‘the cause’ and blind to the disintegration of his clan. Cotten’s haggard portrayal is completely convincing. Astoundingly, it was Cotten’s second foray into Spaghettis. The Hellbenders was the sequel to The Tramplers (1966), which also starred Cotten as an ex-Confederate – the flamboyantly named Temple Cordine, head of the Cordine clan, who distributes justice by lynching anyone who doesn’t agree with his racist, redundant views. In both films, Cotten’s character is opposed by one of his sons, who tries unsuccessfully to make him change his ways.
    So, what are the main things that The Hellbenders has going for it? Corbucci’s sense of the bizarre, for one thing, as well as Morricone’s mournful ‘Death of the South’ trumpet score and a cruel twist at the tale’s end. The premise of the coffin containing a dead soldier, but really brimming with stolen cash, was an idea borrowed from Leone’s The Good , the Bad and the Ugly , but Corbucci uses it in a completely original way – Corbucci’s hearse is actually the same Confederate ambulance prop from Leone’s film. The riverside robbery that descends into a massacre at the beginning of The Hellbenders is the only recognisably Corbucci-esque moment, the rest of the movie consisting of the family’s efforts to trick their way past various groups – a posse, the army, some bandits, a priest and the Indians. These encounters are filled with tension, but tension is not what the director does best, nor what his audiences expect. In a macabre joke, Corbucci even has Jonas and his hearse encounter one of the dead hero’s old comrades (now on pension), but he turns out to be blind and so can’t identify Clare as an impostor. Cotten made one further Spaghetti called White Comanche (1968), which starred another unexpected Anglo refugee – William Shatner, who’d just appeared in the Star Trek TV series and must have thought he’d really reached the final frontier when he landed in dusty Spain.
The Verdict
     
    The presence of Cotten makes this watchable, but the number of rip-offs released hot on the heels of The Hellbenders (none) gives a fair idea of its impact on the Spaghetti-Western craze.

The Big Gundown (1967) 
     
    Directed by: