Cemetery Without Crosses - 1969

Unlike almost all other Spaghetti Westerns. But if I tell you why, that'll blow the plot.

Robert Hossein brings his obsessive pacing and emotion to the genre, with strange, compelling results. 

Playing the "hero," Hossein wears his pistol in the most awkward possible position. Before every gunfight, he pulls one black glove onto his non-shooting hand, fetishizing the gunfight and, bless his heart, evoking The Music Machine.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OhY4ipNbPY

But gunfights are not Hossein's jam – and this is Western! He constantly cuts away from the shooting to the shot flailing about in death agonies. Hossein cares about emotion, grief and rage, foremost, and love fueled by grief and rage.

Long dead sections in which nothing happens, as in all Spaghetti Westerns, and one long gag sequence that seems a parody of Leone and a damn good one.

Gorgeous shots of Hossein riding a gorgeous horse – or maybe it's a stunt guy; the camera's never near enough for certainty – and more dead bodies than Act 3 of Hamlet.

In other words, it's pretty great.

PS: It starts in B/W. I feared the usual Amazon fuckup of less-seen films, but it goes to color, as it should, after the opening credits.