Gone with the West

Ex-convict James Caan is released from prison and sets out to exact some long overdue vengeance on Aldo Ray, the man who murdered his family years before and apparently the rest of the town as well.

There's some trashy fun at first but things run out of steam pretty quick and never recover.

A paper thin story, the obnoxious free-wheeling 1970's style direction, and the bad funk score are all pretty off-putting, as is the terrible performance by Stephanie Powers, who looks like Johnny Depp in Benny & Joon and is so verbally challenged she makes Tonto look like a radio talk show host!

The great Sammy Davis Jr. is sadly wasted in this. His leather-clad gunfighter character was the most entertaining thing in the movie and really deserved a better script!

I agree that this move must have originally been unfinished, or else something bad happened during the production - mainly because of the wrap-around present-day footage and narration that is completely redundant. What I can't figure out is how a cheapo movie like this got stars that were (of the time) pretty prominent, especially Caan. Well, Davis can probably be explained, because he appears in only a few scenes that were probably filmed in a day. I got a laugh out of his shiny black leather pants, and Powers was so mind-bogglingly awful (hardly speaking a word of English, by the way) that there was some extra amusement from that. Other than that, this is an incredibly painful western to sit through, with some of the most ludicrous plot turns even to hit the prairie.

Newspaper folk from the city, doing a piece on ghost towns, get an earful from a batty old crone near San Juan Batista who tells them a tall tale of the Old West. Excruciating western, apparently played for laughs, pits lonesome cowpoke James Caan against small town strong-arm Aldo Ray, with Stefanie Powers as an Indian love-interest who apparently doesn't speak English. Showing definite, crippling signs of post-production interference, this threadbare film is so ineptly edited, one feels as though he's watching a proposed pilot for a TV series which never sold. It isn't fair to call the end results a 'film' or a 'movie'...it's simply an excuse for the actors (good ones, mind you) to make a little extra money. Hopefully, the cast and their managers were well-paid. NO STARS from ****

This is probably something that James Caan either doesn't remember or will not talk about. It has a release date of 1975 but was more likely filmed anywhere between '70 and '72 considering Caan's career went into high gear by the end of '72, not to mention how young he and Stefanie Powers look. Obviously something went seriously wrong with the western that some non-entity named Bernard Girard directed, thus the "need" to offer some contemporary (mid-70's) wrap-around footage. Perhaps a total lack of coherence required adding the story-telling narrative. Regardless, the whole thing is a botch, modern-day accessory footage included. It has something to do with Aldo Ray as the town baddie who steals Caan's cattle and molests Powers and the two victims seek revenge by destroying Ray's rotten town. Davis, Jr. is Ray's hired gunslinger. Strange fact: Davis, Jr. was actually a quick draw in real life. Apparently he was clocked at one time as one of the fastest ever. Sammy seemed to be a natural at anything he attempted (just ask Linda Lovelace... but that's another story). Yet poor Sammy appears absurd in his Jack-Palance-from-'Shane' outfit and has little to do except act phony-tough and gun down a few bozos in his few scenes. At least Aldo Ray seems to be having fun (his paycheck happily covering his liquor bill, no doubt). Meanwhile, Powers adds a little comedy relief, a little skin, and not a word of English. Caan is fine (his pleasant demeanor unmolested by the knowledge the film he was ostensibly appearing in would later be edited by a mix-master). Oh, and the music score is as goofy and wrong-headed as the film itself.

Though this film seems to have had a cute idea for a tongue-in-cheek western send-up at its heart, the result was so bad it reminds one of the cheesy pornographic films from the same era. Surely the production values are that low, and and as others have noted, the editing was such as should have earned any film-school student a failing grade. How a name-brand a cast like this one ever got involved with something so poor is to be wondered at. Perhaps no less wondrous is why really awful films like these get released on DVD while so many other infinitely more redeeming ones still fail to see the light of day (I personally am still waiting for "The Secret of Santa Vittoria" with Anthony Quinn). Rest assured, younger viewers, that this disaster is far, far below even the average quality of films of its time. Speaking of which, the 1975 release date cited in these pages cannot be accurate because the Oldsmobile Cutlass so prominently featured in the beginning of the film (yet another waste of otherwise perfectly good celluloid in connection with this movie) was not on the market until the 1978 model year.