A Rope for a Bastard Review
Una Forca per un Bastardo - Database Page
A curiosity: a spaghetti western in the form of a whodunit, as if Agatha Christie had taken over from Sergio Leone in the Italian western wonderland. It’s the first of three low-low-budget westerns by director Amasi Damiani. His movies belong to the most obscure examples of the genre (*1).
Mimmo Palmara plays a sheriff who saves the life of a man who is wrongly accused of murder and is about to be hanged by a bloodthirsty lynch mob. The sheriff is now forced to investigate the murder case, but the leader of the lynch mob keeps interfering with his job by accusing various persons, among them a Mexican nobleman living on the outskirts of town. Things are further complicated when the son of the murdered man makes his appearance and a dark family secret is unearthed. Along with the victim’s son, the sheriff sets a trap to smoke out the culprit …
In spite of familiar locations like the Elios studios and the Villa Mussolini, plus a couple of familiar spaghetti western faces (Fortunato Arena has a nice cameo as the town bully), there is no real spaghetti western atmosphere. The working title was Chi ha ucciso Abraham Everton? (Who killed Abraham Everton?, so maybe it wasn’t meant to be a western at all. Anyway, the script could have served as the base for an episode of Inspector Morse or any other British detective series. Even the traditional brawl in the saloon causes an alienating effect: it takes place during a bridal shower (nice detail: the girl’s fiancé is no other than the sheriff, but he’s so busy playing detective that he arrives too late to avoid the large-scale fistfight!). The identity of the killer will be a complete surprise to most viewers, but the idea is not properly developed and the denouement literally falls out of the blue sky.
A Rope for a Bastard was released in Italy on April 3, 1968, but in the course of the years all copies went missing. Apparently lead actor Palmara was very fond of the movie and has therefore been looking for years for a copy with the original Italian language (2). The only version available was the German dubbed version, named Eine Kugel für den Bastard (3). Most probably it’s still the only version available today. Luckily the German dub is very good but note that the forca (noose, rope) from the original title has become a bullet (Kugel) in German.
Notes:
- (1) The other two movies are Tara Pokì, a blend of melodrama and western, which got a limited release in 1971, and I fantasmi di Omah-Ri, which was never officially released but was shown, in the presence of the director and author Marco Giusti, in Rome in November 2015.
- (2) See: Marco Giusti, Dizionario del western all’italiana
- (3) It was released in Germany on VHS under the title Wyoming Connection and on DVD as Eine Kugel für den Bastard; the film is also available – in good image quality – on You Tube (German audio)
Dir: Amasi Damiani – Cast: Mimmo Palmara, Livio Lorenzon, Caterina Trentini, Barth Warren, Josyane Gibert, Livio Lorenzon, Gualtiero Rispoli, Francesco De Leone, Fortunato Arena, Piero Mazzinghi, Leo De Ny – Music: Michele Lacerenza
