Bad Man's River

source: Bad Man's River

El hombre de Río Malo

I would cheerfully watch a barrel of manure if it had Lee Van Cleef in it. But I draw the line at this. By rights, films this bad should be hilarious. Yet this is anything but. Why? Partly because it is SUPPOSED to be a comedy (did they decide that before or after production - difficult to tell). But mostly because there is no conviction. The over-riding production value is to go through the motions and get the thing over with. Hence the appalling score is unhingingly irritating and the "action" is so badly put together with freeze frames and plot jumps that I assumed my DVD player was playing up and I took the disk out to clean it. Sadly it didn't help. An electric sander might have improved matters by making the thing impossible to play. This film is drivel. Avoid.

Really campy movie with the most unlikely high quality cast I remember in a Western. James Mason? La Lollo? Paired alongside the extremely limited Lee Van Cleef in a spaghetti Western? Those three were approaching the end of their careers and must have been dire hard up, really in need of dosh...

In the summer of 1972 I was a missionary for the LDS Church in Bandung, Indonesia. In those days we had one day a month we could go to a movie. On that particular day we chose to go see "Bad Man's River". I can't tell you how this movie ended as I got up and walked out in the middle of it! Mind you, this was the ONLY opportunity over a month long period that I could see I movie. In those circumstances, if I was to walk of a movie it must have been a real bowser. As I recall the straw that broke the camel's back was the sad realization that a more or less distinguished actor like James Mason had been reduced to appearing in total Derek. Lee Van Cleef was in his element, but even he was approaching the margin with this one.

Lee Van Cleef is conned by Gina Lollobrigida TWICE...first into marrying her (she robs him), then into helping her come into a million dollars thanks to her involvement with Mexican revolutionary James Mason. The unlikely pairing of Van Cleef & Lollobrigida actually works well but Mason is miscast in his relatively small role. Director "Gene" Martin keeps the pace moving briskly. This is a spaghetti western with a real sense of humor. A fun comic western marred by some really insipid faux country rock ballads thrown into an otherwise fine incidental music score. Also featuring the great Jess Hahn as one of Van Cleef's cronies.

I have seen this film in a double feature together with SABATA and it fell clearly short in comparison with the latter. The cast is good(Van Cleef, James Mason, Eduardo Fajardo and Gina Lollobrigida) and the "sets"(e.g. a riverboat) are somewhat original. But the score is mostly annoying and the story was unable to really involve me(Don't ask me intensely about the plot!). The Comedy is often fast paced and sometimes mildly funny. For people who like the country/pop/rock score, however, things might look certainly different. 3 / 10.

This eccentric Euro-Western has more in common with the revisionist, light-hearted approach of BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) than with any of the sadistic Italian fare shot around the same time and on the same locations. A great, eclectic cast (Lee Van Cleef, James Mason, Gina Lollobrigida, Sergio Fantoni, Jess Hahn, Simon Andreu, Eduardo Fajardo, Gianni Garko, Diana Lorys) finds itself somewhat stranded - and in the case of Mason, evidently embarrassed - in the face of the film's bizarre changes of mood, some of which work (there are a few enjoyably comical action sequences) and some of which don't (why the director chose to overdose on the "freeze-frame" stuff at the beginning is anyone's guess); in light of all this, the involvement of talented Hollywood veterans Philip Yordan, Irving Lerner and Bernard Gordon is even more baffling. All in all, however, BAD MAN'S RIVER emerges as a surprisingly pleasant, if ultimately forgettable, diversion.