FILM REVIEW OF ''TUMBLEWEED" (1953)

Audie Murphy finds himself in desperate trouble in “Land Raiders” director Nathan Juran’s exciting western “Tumbleweed” (*** OUT OF ****) when he tangles with hostile Yaqui Indians and treacherous whites.  What sets this Murphy horse opera apart is “Red Mountain” scenarist John Meredyth Lucas’ audacious screenplay based on Kenneth Perkins’ novel "Three Were Renegades."  Murphy gets himself mired deeper into danger to clear himself as this adventurous 79-minute oater winds down to its finale.  Initially, our resourceful hero displays benevolence when he comes to the aid of a wounded Yaqui brave in the desert.  Apparently, an unknown white gunman shot the Yaqui in the left shoulder and left him for dead.  Jim Harvey (Audie Murphy of “The Kid from Texas”) digs a bullet out of Tigre (Eugene Iglesias of “Apache Rifles”), the son of Yaqui chieftain Aguila (Ralph Moody of “Reprisal!”) who abhors whites with a passion.  At one point, a hateful Tigre tries to stab Harvey, but our hero manages to deflect this futile effort.  After saving Tigre’s life, our hero accepts a job as a guide for a group of pioneers.  At first, when he meets Harvey in the town of Mile High, wagon train master Seth Blanden (Ross Elliot of “Never So Few”) thinks Harvey is too young to provide them with adequate guidance.  Attractive Laura Saunders (Lori Nelson) is the sister-in-law traveling with relatives.  She likes the sight of Harvey, but Seth’s wife Sarah (Madge Meredith of “Trail Street”) disapproves of a drifter like Harvey.  Sarah wanted Laura to marry Seth’s brother Lam (Russell Johnson of “Gilligan’s Island”) because he is a stable individual. Harvey does a good job as a guide until the Yaquis box them in and try to burn their wagons.  Harvey sends the two women into hiding, and then he rides under a white flag of truce to parley with Aguila.  As it turns out, Aguila doesn’t believe that his son would befriend a white man.  The Yaqui chief ties Jim down between two spears and promises to carve his eyelids so he can watch the sun burn out his vision at dawn.  Tigre’s mother (Belle Mitchell of “Soylent Green”) lets Jim escape.  Afterward, Jim catches a ride back into the town of Borax.  He discovers that he is a persona non grata because the Yaquis scalped and killed the men, but the two women and a baby in the wagon train survived.

Ironically, Sheriff Murchoree (Chill Wills of “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid”) keeps the townspeople from lynching Harvey when he shows up in town and generates controversy with his unaccounted for presence.  The citizens have a noose around Harvey’s neck and they have Murchoree crowded, so he cannot get to Harvey until one of his deputies, Marv (Lee Van Cleef of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”), armed with a Winchester intervenes, and Murchoree can extract his six-gun from his shoulder holster.  Murchoree puts Harvey into protective custody.  Later, during the night, Tigre breaks into the jail where Harvey is being held, stabs the guard that Murchoree left in charge, and the Yaqui explains that the guards were going to let the townspeople into lynch him.  Not long afterward, they are pursued by the townspeople and Tigre takes a bullet and dies.  Before the Yaqui dies, he informs Harvey that a white man had a hand into the massacre.  Eventually, a posse pursues Harvey.  Meantime, he finds himself afoot again when his horse goes lame.  Initially, he tries to steal a horse from a rancher, Nick Buckley (Roy Roberts of “Kid Galahad”), but Buckley’s ranch hand catches him before he can.  Harvey meets Buckley and his wife Louella (K.T. Stevens of “Vice Squad”) and explains his awful predicament.  Buckley takes sympathy on him and loads him calls the decrepit looking horse called ‘Tumbleweed.’ An incredulous Harvey is surprised when the animal displays amazing mountain sense and enables him to elude the posse.  At one point, when Harvey is about to die of thirst, ‘Tumbleweed’ scrapes a hole into the dirt that yields water.  Murchoree catches up with Harvey, but he is dying from thirst, too, when our hero finds him.  Strangely enough, Harvey wants to find Aguila because he is the only man who can clear him.  The revelation as to the identity of the white man who worked with the Indians is a surprise.  Our hero and the villain battle it out with their fists and the fight progresses from the desert floor up atop a mountain where the villain tries to crush Harvey with a rock.  

Lee Van Cleef has a bigger than usual role and he isn’t a slimy villain like he was during his usual 1950s westerns.  “Tumbleweed” qualifies not only as an above-average Audie Murphy oater but a welcome departure from his more straightforward routine sagebrushers.

 

Spaghetti Western Review: "MY NAME IS PECOS" (1966- Italian)

What “Hercules the Avenger” director Maurizio Lucidi's Maurizi's sagebrusher “My Name Is Pecos” (1966) lacks in terms of the style and scope of a Sergio Leone blood bath, this low-budget, cynical, revenge-themed Italian horse opera makes up for it with its standard-issue, nihilistic violence. The sweaty, unsavory villains shoot anybody without a second thought. They show no mercy for even unarmed, handicapped men that cannot defend themselves. As far as that goes, the solitary hero displays a similar predilection to violence, but vengeance primarily motivates him. Aside from the traditional protagonists and antagonists, the character of loathsome undertaker emerges from the background for a change and participates in the action, not necessarily on the side of good, and this is a difference between “My Name Is Pecos" (**1/2 out of ****) and run-of-the-mill European westerns. Swarthy Robert Woods is convincing enough as the resilient, swift-shooting protagonist with a deadly aim. After all, a passel of Spaghetti westerns, among them the sequel “Pecos Cleans Up,” “Savage Guns,” “Five Thousand Dollars on One Ace,” “Johnny Colt,” “Seven Guns for the MacGregors,” “The Belle Starr Story,” “Machine Gun Killers,” “Challenge of the McKennas,” and “A Colt in the Hand of the Devil,” top-billed Woods as the hero. Although he is forged in the mold of the Man with No Name, Pecos suffers the wrath of the villains in a moment of vulnerability, just as Clint Eastwood did in the first two “Dollars” epics.

Interestingly, what sets “My Name Is Pecos” (**1/2 out of ****) apart from most Spaghetti westerns is its Hispanic hero. Mind you, Mexicans were the heroes largely in the politically-themed oaters about the numerous revolutions that rocked Mexico between the end of the American Civil War in the late 1860s to the 1920s. Occasionally, the grimy villains refer to Pecos as a Mexicano. This implies that he is the son of Mexicans that bore him in Texas. Unfortunately, the outlaws bandy the two terms Mexican and Mexicano interchangeably so Pecos cannot with surety be called either. One thing is for certain, the bad guys fare abysmally when they challenge him in duels. Furthermore, “My Name Is Pecos” benefits from “One Damned Day at Dawn . . . Django Meets Sartana!” composer Lotto Gori’s lively little score and the ballad sung during the opening credits has a rhythmic quality that sounds like the pop song “House of the Rising Sun.” Most Spaghetti westerns contain charismatic orchestral music.

A lone gunman with neither horse nor gun trudges through the desert with a blinding sun glaring unmercifully down on him. Eventually, he reaches a Mexican hovel where he can get water, but an unfriendly American gunman lounges outside. When the sombrero wearing peon and his wife poke their heads out at the arrival of the stranger, the black-clad, American gunman drills a couple of slugs their way, driving them back into their white-washed, adobe-brick house. Dropping his saddle, the Hispanic hero ambles up to American gunman who offers him a scoop of water. The American gunman warns Pecos about being unarmed, “It’s not very healthy to travel without a gun around these parts.” Pecos pays him twenty dollars in paper money for a Colt’s .45 revolver. As our hero walks away with his back to the him, the treacherous American gunman replaces the gun that he sold to the stranger with another firearm. Just as the gunman draws on Pecos, the stranger whirls and guns him down, then identifies him, “They call me Pecos.” Pecos (Robert Woods of “The Battle of the Bulge”) orders the peons to bury the dead gunslinger.

The villains that Pecos Martinez tangles with enter the plot as they pursue a man furiously whipping a team of horses hauling a wagon piled high with beer barrels. Pecos watches them as they storm through a pass from Laredo to Houston in pursuit of the wagon. The wagon driver reaches Houston before the Kline gang and stashes a barrel stuffed with $80-thousand in the saloon. Hustling back outside, he tries to ambush Joe Kline (Pier Paolo Capponi of “Commandos”) and his outlaw gang. The Kline gang are determined to recover the loot they stole from the Bank of Laredo. It seems that Kline trusted some skunks and they stole the loot from him after the robbery. Kline flushes the wagon driver out and they grill him about the money. When the wagon driver tries to kill Kline, one of Kline's men shoots him dead. Naturally, Kline is furious. "You idiot, you killed him off too fast. How are we gonna find the money now." In fact, Kline and his murderous cutthroats spend the remainder of “My Name Is Pecos” searching for the money. One outlaw shoots the telegraph wire to ensure that no messages about their whereabouts reach the Texas Rangers. Kline refuses to leave until they find the cash, even though the Texas Rangers may be on his trail. Kline has a deep rope burn around his neck from when the authorities tried to hang him. The scarred outlaw leaves couple of men in Houston and backtrack the wagon. Anyway, the two Kline gunmen confront Pecos and make the mistake of trying to shoot it out with our hero. After they die, our hero identifies himself. Later, Pecos discovers the location of the loot and has to kill two more of Kline's men. Meanwhile, the devious undertaker Morton (Umberto Raho of “Duel of Champions”) informs Kline about Pecos’ whereabouts under the saloon. The villains capture Pecos and beat him to a pulp, just as Clint Eastwood got beaten up in “A Fistful of Dollars.”

Nina, the Mexico senorita who works in the saloon, smuggles Pecos a knife while Kline’s man is distracted. She operates a spinning wheel upstairs above the room where Pecos is confined, and she lowers knife by twine through a crack in the floor. Pecos kills the guard with the blade and Nina helps him escape. They take refuge in Dr. Berton’s office. No sooner have they done so than Tedder, the saloon keeper, lugs over a barrel of wine that secretly contains the $80-thousand. When the outlaws ride back into Houston, Kline and his men discover that Pecos is missing as well as the Mexican girl so they high-tail it out to where Nina's parents are working in the field and start killing peons. They are about to rape Nina's sister when Pecos cuts them down from afar with a Winchester. Eventually, Pecos confronts the evil Morton at boot hill. Morton tries to shoot Pecos in the back, but our resourceful protagonist guns him down. Later, we learn that Pecos came from the same village as Nina and that he is seeking revenge against the dastardly Kline who wiped out his family. Kline and his gang hate Hispanics. Pecos delivers the missing loot to Kline and his pistoleros at the end of the story. However, they have a little surprise because Pecos has hidden a stick of dynamite in the barrel and he shoots it, it explodes, and kills them. Pecos strangles Kline to death.

'My Name is Pecos" illustrates several princples of the genre. First, turning your back on the villains in a Spaghetti western is a surefire way to catch a slug in the spine. Second, the law is ineffectual. Kline's outlaws have run all five lawmen out of Houston and the only law comes from the barrel of a six-shooter. Third, greed is rampant. The outlaws cannot trust each other and the undertaker is willing to sell out anybody for money. Fourth, life is cheap but death is quick. Innocent bystanders as well as bad men are gunned down in the blink of an eye. In other words, violence is the first resort. Fifth, vigilante justice takes precedence over duely constituted legal measures. “My Name Is Pecos” qualifies as a formulaic example of a continental western with a catchy musical score.