Freshman director Denys McCoy's post American Civil War western "The Last Rebel" with Joe Namath, Jack Elam, Woody Strode, and Ty Hardin isn't as bad as I first thought. Indeed, "Beyond the Law" scenarist Warren Kiefer and co-scenarist Rea Redifer have fashioned an entirely believable, rather predictable, but modestly entertaining horse opera about two Confederate soldiers who split up and then shoot up a town in Missouri. The anachronistic Jon Lord and Tony "Deep Purple" Aston orchestral score is the best thing about it. Unfortunately, it is easy to understand why Denys McCoy, aka Larry Spangler, used a pseudonym. Presumably, he learned his lesson here. Nevertheless, Spangler deserves credit for imitating "Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" opening credits with his own rendition, relying on Harper's Weekly newspaper wood cuts of the Civil War for the opening credits.
Southwest Missouri in the spring of 1865 is the setting and the time. The Federal troops are dug in on one side of the river, while the Confederate troops have fortified themselves on the opposite bank. Anybody can see how The Civil War foreshadowed World War I. Matt Graves (Jack Elam of "Kansas City Confidential") spots a duck splashing in the river. Graves rouses Burnside Hollis (Joe Namath of "Avalanche Express") and Hollis fetches his rifle. A Union rifleman aims at the duck, but Hollis blows the bird out of the water with one shot. The Union sharpshooter grumbles, "That reb never misses."
Nine minutes into the action, a Confederate messenger arrives and informs the lieutenant that Robert E. Lee has surrendered. The lieutenant (Herb Andress of "Lady Frankenstein") rides out to meet a Union officer (Sebastian Segriff) in the middle of the river to discuss terms of surrender. The Union officer warns him he must display a white flag. Before the Confederate lieutenant can hang a white flag on his saber, the Yankees cut him down in a hail of gunfire. Hollis decides he doesn't want to wind up in a Federal prison camp, so he skedaddles. Matt follows him. They ride off and don't stop until they spot a southern lynch mob about to string up a former Union soldier, Duncan (Woody Strode of "The Professionals"), and Hollis demands his release. He gives Duncan a horse and scatters the southerners. This is sort of a surprise and says a lot about Hollis as a person.
Later that evening, Matt confides in Hollis. "I don't like the way things are going. What I mean is, here we are, two busted rebels out in the middle of nowhere, with a rock (Duncan) in our pocket. The way I see it, we been running so long we don't know how to do nothing else. It's time that we stopped and dug our heels in." Matt is the schemer of the bunch, and Elam makes a superb villain.
Hollis trusts Duncan, but Matt doesn't share Hollis' sentiments about Duncan. Our heroes find a stagecoach with a dead man in it and a young girl. When they arrive in town with the stagecoach, Hollis and Matt tell the sheriff (a bearded Ty Hardin of "PT-109") what happened. The sheriff wants them out of town in an hour. Our heroes cheerfully ignore him and set themselves up over at Pearl's place, a sort of saloon & cathouse. Meanwhile, Matt obtains Hollis a suit of clothes fit for a tinhorn. Hollis suckers a cowboy pool hustler (Michael Forest of “100 Rifles”) and takes him for every cent. Basically, he wins about $4-thousand dollars and he entrusts it for safe keeping with Duncan, so that he can enjoy himself in the arms of Pearl (Victoria George of "El Dorado") Matt demands his share of the loot. Hollis tells him that he gave it all to Duncan, but he doesn't know Duncan's whereabouts. Hollis tracks down Duncan. Duncan, it seems, had taken the cash and hidden it in his double-barreled shotgun. Masquerading as the Klu Klux Klansmen, Matt sneaks up on them and arrests them. They force Hollis and Duncan to dig a deep hole and then toss in knives to see who will survive. Our heroes surprise the bad guys and decimate them with the help of a young African American youth (Bruce Eweka) who wields a rifle.
Later, Matt teams up with The Sheriff, but their alliance is short-lived when Duncan drops the lawman with both barrels of his double-barreled shotgun and Hollis drill him once for good measure. One of Matt's trigger-happy pistoleros shoots Pearl. This is the second most surprising thing about "The Last Rebel," since the Pearl character has done nothing wrong. Hollis resolves to kill the assassin. He wants to confront Matt out on main street, but by this time, Matt's men have started a fire. Duncan laments the fire. "It'd be nice to use that front door once." Hollis smashes through a window, lands in the street and starts blasting away, while Duncan joins him. The conflagration that consumes Pearl's place backlights Hollis in a heroic pose.
"The Last Rebel" isn’t as bad as everybody says. Joe Namath delivers an acceptable performance as Burnside Hollis and doesn’t say anything more than he must. When Hollis decides to ride back to town to save the girl, Duncan observes, "That's playing a damn fool." Hollis replies, "Well, I guess I never was much else." Jack Elam as the principal villain, Woody Strode as the ex-Union soldier, and Ty Hardin as a corrupt sheriff bolster the cast. Ty Hardin has a memorable death scene in the bordello lobby where he gets riddled with bullets. Although this movie was lensed in Rome, "The Last Rebel" doesn't resemble a Spaghetti western. Cinematographer Carlo Carlini's work here is pathetic compared with his stupendous work on "Death Rides A Horse." When "The Last Rebel" came out, it was still acceptable to refer to African Americans by the 'n' word. Finally, Spangler got the firearms right for the era. Everybody totes black powder guns.
