Day of Anger (1967)

We already discussed Tonino Valerii’s My Name Is Nobody early this week. He also made this film with Lee Van Cleef, a face that Western audiences associate with the Italian Western.

Here, he plays Frank Talby, an aging gunfighter who starts to teach the rules of the life to Scott Mary (Giuliano Gemma, who will always be known as Ringo). However, the life of constant death may not be the right life for Scott, as Murph tries to teach him. The end of this movie is sobering; there is no real triumph in the death that he unleashes.

Come for the Western action; stay for the story and the Riz Ortolani score (you can hear some of it in Django Unchained). This film is an interesting counterpoint to Valerii’s later Nobody. It also features Al Mulock (who died in spectacular fashion in Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly; when he killed himself by diving out of his hotel window in full costume while making Once Upon a Time In the West, Leone famously yelled, “Get the costume, we need the costume.”) and German actress Christa Linder, who was in Fulci’s Dracula in the Provinces.

You can watch this movie on YouTube.