Let’s face it: The Acid West was going out of style by the time Blaxploitation was taking the country by storm. Combining the two disparate genres was a simple yet magical idea. Instead of commenting on Post-Civil Rights racism, the ass-kicking brothers could take aim at rich white slave owners as well as the typical Western outlaw scrubs. There aren’t a whole lot of Jive Westerns out there, much less many good ones. Fred “The Hammer” Williamson featured in two of the more entertaining examples of this curious hybridization. There was the sublimely ridiculous, ultra-violent, and profane (yet still PG rated) Boss Nigger, along with this more mainstream 20th Century Fox offering.

Take a Hard Ride was director Antonio Margheriti’s follow-up to The Stranger and the Gunfighter, another Western hybrid experiment that paired weary genre vet Lee Van Cleef with Hong Kong superstar Lo Lieh, who travel the untamed frontier with guns and flying guillotines close at hand.

The always poker-faced Van Cleef is the connective tissue between Marghereti’s two Acid Western fusions, of course; his presence at the very opening of Take a Hard Ride, where he rips off Charles Bronson’s Harmonica by playing an eerie ditty on his own harmonica, establishes the appropriate Spaghetti tone with alchemical precision. From there, it’s less than two minutes before old Lee, playing his usual morally ambiguous bounty hunter archetype, guns down a wanted man and his buddy in front of a church. But don’t let his disturbingly casual attitude towards ending human life let you think he’s a bad guy. Even though he’s instrumental in getting the film’s protagonists into all kinds of crappy situations, as well as orchestrating the massacres of several groups of people (duplicitous honkys, one and all), he just might have a heart of gold under his oily, leathery, cordite-stained exterior.

His persistent pursuit of Jim Brown, who has a sack of gold belonging to the estate of recently deceased Dana Andrews, draws in lowlifes from all four corners of the map. It’s clear from early on that his journey into Sonora will be fraught with peril. An early trip to the watering hole almost ends in disaster if not for the timely appearance of cardsharp Fred Williamson, who happens to carry around sacks full of poisonous snakes. Fred and Jim decide to join forces, each “watching the other’s tail”, bonding through frequent gun battles, sleeping on horseback. The two will Take a Hard Ride through a gauntlet of ignorant white oppression.

Don’t let that innocent PG rating on the poster fool you. They could have appealed to the Militant Black audience and retitled the film Jim Brown’s Wild West Honky Massacre without misrepresenting the product in any way.

After much ado, the boys’re eventually joined by mute “Indian” Jim Kelly, who does such a halfassed job with his fisticuffs, and his one dimensional character, that it’s curious why he was even included. A French actress named Catherine Spaak supplies some eye candy for what is otherwise a testosterone laden sausage fest. The story works into a rut once we’re back to the familiar Stagecoach model of “strangers bicker and travel, getting into gun battles every 10-15 minutes”. Despite what the classical structure, and Jerry Goldsmith’s unabashedly old-fashioned score, attempt to evoke, the essential blaxploitation nature bleeds through with each and every righteous killing. Yet, save for the alarmingly brutal murder of an innocent supporting character, none of the violence has any sort of impact.

None of the cast members look particularly beleaguered, battle-scarred or otherwise affected by the corrosive desert sands. A gritty atmosphere is never quite established, even though the Canary Islands locations look convincingly John Fordian, the action flows blisteringly, and the ever sneering face of Lee Van Cleef as he watches the carnage from the sidelines never ceases to be creepy. So how does Take a Hard Ride feel so inconsequential in light of its hair-raising body count and surplus of Black Power?

Margheriti (directing under his Anglo nom de plume of Joseph Manduke) has a feel for grand Western vistas, and throws us the occasional artistic composition between the action sequences, which were directed by Hal Needham with the passion he would later apply to destroying cop cars with Burt Reynolds. Some lame “intrigue” with Fred Williamson’s morality leads to naught save for a pointless, dusty fist fight that adds nothing to the story except some slight homoerotica. Of course the brothers are going to remain together, to blow away more faceless waves of Caucasian horsemen and possibly detonate several pounds of dynamite to, uh, blow away even more of them.

Sergio Sollima could handle moral ambiguity and jarring plot twists in even his laziest work; his nihilistic style would doubtless have improved this frivolous material. Margheriti/Manduke is too in love with deep focus and the natural splendor of the Canary Islands to worry about characterization or nuance. Despite his prolific output of exploitation fare, there is nothing truly exceptional in his body of work, though he did well enough to be casually name-dropped in Inglourious Basterds.

For its  artistic shortcomings, Take a Hard Ride still delivers on a base level, and fans of 70s cheese will delight in its Jive Turkey trappings. Those expecting anything other than a lot of dead white dudes will be sorely disappointed. Hell, even those who stick out the entirety of their Hard Ride will be let down by its colossal anticlimax. Is Van Cleef supposed to be a Death figure, or a manifestation of White Guilt? Why doesn’t he recieve his just desserts? Is it just because he’s that cool that he can get away with being pure evil? Oh well, that’s how it goes in the Acid West.

Tags: fred williamson, jim brown, jim kelly, jive westerns, lee van cleef, take a hard ride

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