Death Rides a Horse is a fairly straightforward, more or less effective Pasta Western, but stumbles in its too clear-cut boundaries. From its clumsy beginning (a team of guards announce superfluously to each other that they’re guarding $200,000), five bandits descend upon the camp in an orgy of violence. Four of the bandits enter a house with a man having dinner with his wife, teenage daughter, and little boy. The man is killed, the women subsequently raped and killed, and the little boy gets to watch the whole horror show. The little boy marks each killer; one has a tattoo of a royal flush upon his face, another wears a special hooped earrings, another sports a scar, and the last one has a memorable face, I guess. The men set the house afire, but the boy is saved by the mysterious last fifth bandit, who can only be identified by a skull necklace he is wearing.
Death Rides a Horse then flashes forward fifteen years later. The boy, Billy (played by a stiff and not terribly convincing John Philip Law) has grown to be a master marksman, and his only goal in life is vengeance. In the next scene, an older man named Ryan (Lee Van Cleef) is released from prison after serving fifteen years hard labor. The judge obligingly returns Ryan’s guns, bullets, and $83. It turns out Ryan was one of the those five bandits on that fateful night, and he’s also bent on revenge.
Of course, Billy and Ryan cross paths, and the story takes an unusual turn in how both men try to prevent each other from taking vengeance. The cinematography of Death Rides a Horse is top-notch, and the four bandits who fucked over Ryan carry the film with their grimy, sleazy, underhanded personas. Two of the bandits have risen to prominence; one is a respected saloon owner, while the other has entered politics. But they’re still quite willing to kill and fuck over Ryan once again, which they do multiple times.
But Death Rides a Horse lacks the moral ambiguity that I crave in these films. Though Ryan and Billy are killers in their own right, there is a very clear cut distinction of good and evil. The fact that Ryan is as much a murdering scum as the bandits he is pursuing is never really explored. I guess breaking rocks for fifteen years rehabilitated him. I had to wince at Ryan’s embarrassing “You should have been my son” speech to Billy. And the last “let’s fortify the village against the army of bandits” scene comes off as a ham-handed rip-off of The Magnificent Seven and The Seven Samurai.
Death Rides the Horse has potential in its moody photography and great supporting actors, but Law is such a lightweight actor with such a lightweight script that Death Rides a Horse really should have been retitled Death Isn’t Such a Bad Guy After All. Death Rides a Horse is a competent, entertaining enough film, and I recommend this film for the Lee Van Cleef completist and the Western fanatic. But there is far, far better Spaghetti out there.
Tags: death rides a horse, lee van cleef