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.

Sergio Martino’s eerie and harsh Mannaja (US title A Man Called Blade) was one of the last Spaghetti Westerns ever made. This melancholy and superbly shot 1977 film reflects not only the end of a cinematic era, but the final death of idealism before we all marched into the “dismal tide” of the 1980s. The film has three solid leads, one of which only appears in the beginning and end of the film. The grim and laconic hero Blade (crime caper star Maurizio Merli), the sadistic and enraged Voller (a greasy and relentless John Steiner), and the unpredictable Burt Craven (mop top nutcase Donald O’Brien, who looks and plays like sort of a toned down version of Klaus Kinski).

The opening of Mannaja appears almost medieval; you can’t tell you’re watching a western until you see the gun belts three minutes into the movie. A mud encrusted Craven is running through a swamp, with an unseen person in hot pursuit. Here, O’Brien’s manic face is the perfect mask of fear and panic, and the rolling fog lends to the scene’s unsettling atmosphere. It turns out Blade is chasing after him. Craven pulls a gun on him, but Blade is ready with his signature axe.

Blade is a bounty hunter who is not only quick and accurate with a gun, but lightning fast with his hatchets as well. Blade can chop off your hand or impale you in the forehead quicker than you can shoot him down. Though the choreography of Merli’s axe throwing is a rather clumsy and unconvincing, it’s still brutal and shocking when Blade takes someone down with his axe; think of the scene in Kill Bill 1 when The Bride dispatches one of Crazy 88s with an axe to the head. There’s just something about an witnessing an axe impalement that just you want to yell out, “Aaaah, that’s gotta hurt!!”

Blade drags Craven into town to get a $5,000 bounty, but the town has no marshal or sheriff in town to pay up. He tries to get lodging so he and his captive can move on the next day, but Voller and his thugs, who are also mayor’s henchman, tell him to take a hike. This lack of hospitality inspires Blade to fuck with Voller, and voila, the story begins. Blade later tries to muscle in on Voller’s job as security escort for the local shipment of silver, so he goes to Mayor McGowan (Phillipe Leroy), who also owns the silver mine, to get Voller’s job. Blade eventually discovers Voller is behind a rash of highway robberies, and it’s only a matter of time before the two will have it out. But it turns out Blade didn’t just enter that town randomly; he has vengeance on his mind as well.

Mannaja is full of symbolic violence (including a riveting and gruesome miners’ riot), out-of-nowhere double-crosses, and several impressive set pieces. One superb scene involves four thugs hunting down a supposedly blind Blade inside a cave. The lighting and editing in this scene is clear yet disorienting; you really feel you’re spelunking to your death in this sequence. Mannaja also has obvious political overtones, focusing on McGowen’s cruelty to his workers and his Puritanical rule over the mining town.

I also enjoyed the music of Mannaja. At first, I found the weird, Italian-accented baritone voice singing in English a little jarring, but once I started listening to the lyrics, the slow pace of the singing made perfect sense:

You … alone.
A solitary man.
And when the sun goes down
Your memory’s back around
When you … and your heart
Is breaking down

Like … a wolf
At night,
You look for home.
Took all your soul apart,
And make you run away
‘til now
And your mind … won’t forget.

Then a higher pitch, faster chorus comes in with:

This here was your father’s land
Nothing that you can pretend
You want justice,
And you love peace.

When the time has come to kill,
To destroy who loves to kill.
Then your hand … will snap the axe,
And your hatchets … will be satisfied.

Or to put it more succinctly, A Man Called Blade ain’t nutin’ to fuck with.

A Man Called Sergio, the accompanying documentary about the making of Mannaja, puts the film in a whole new perspective. For example, the film was mostly shot in a dilapidated western set, and Martino used the crumbling structures to create a convincingly dirty, muddy, and dying town. The huge Dobermans that Voller lugs around were an inspired choice to make him appear more evil, and naturally there’s a funny story behind the dogs. Martino also talks about Sam Peckinpah’s influence upon Mannaja.

Mannaja is the fitting finale to the cinematic madness launched by The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, a mournful swan song to the end of the Spaghetti Western. It is not only Blade riding off into the sunset in Mannaja, but a whole genre as well.

**SPOILER WARNING**

Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country is a western teetering on the edge of Tradition and Acid. Ride the High Country is one of Peckinpah’s earlier efforts (released in 1962), giving its viewers a prescient glimpse into the legendary director’s later cinematic auteur obsessions and excesses. Ride the High Country is a film that is at once wholly aware and oblivious to its misogyny; the film’s plot revolves around two attempted rapes, one by a “nice” cowboy, the other by a “mean” drunken miner. The first half of the film is its weaker half, but ironically this uneven pacing makes the film all the more shocking and intense; when the second half rolls in, it smacks you in the face like a well-aimed sucker punch. Ride the High Country is the quintessential proto-Acid Western; the film is a landmark on the way to the eventual demise of the myth that was the Old West, a myth that Peckinpah himself disassembled in his masterpiece, The Wild Bunch.

Modernity rears its ugly head when former US Marshall and now aging gun-for-hire Steve Judd (the iconic Joel McCrea) is nearly hit by a horseless carriage in town. He meets up with old buddy Gil Westrum (the equally iconic Randolph Scott), who is running a shady carnival. Steve talks Gil into helping him transport $250,000 worth of gold, to be picked up at a mining town named Coursegold (naturally). Gil brings along his wet-behind-the-ears, pornographically named partner Heck Longtree (Ron Starr), whose unpredictable temperament signals that he will be the story’s trouble magnet. The quarter million of gold actually turns out to be worth only $20,000, the first in the series of dramatic disappointments the characters must face. The film’s dialog often centers around the value of life, with Steve half-jokingly trying to put a dollar amount on every time he has been shot at.

The three compadres spend the night at a religious farmer and his hot daughter’s house, and naturally Heck goes after the fetching redhead. Longing to get out from under her father’s stifling life, Elsa (Mariette Hartley) eventually attaches herself to the boys’ caravan to the mining town, as she is betrothed to a miner there. I don’t want to give away too much of the rest of the film, but I can tell you the Sam Peckinpah that you know and love (as in Straw Dogs, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, etc.) kicks in with a vengeance once the four roll into Coursegold. The scenes set in the town brothel are hilarious, horrifying, and philosophically profound. I was especially impressed by the drunken town judge’s wedding vows, where he speaks the truth about the nature of marriage amidst the terrible, incestuous irony of Elsa’s crumbling dreams. The brothel madam, the mammoth and purple Kate (Jenie Jackson) reminded me of John Water’s “muse” Divine. The trademark harsh laughter of Peckinpah’s films is in evidence, which always signals the approach of sharp violence.

Ride the High Country will likely offend modern sensibilities, especially with regard to the story’s casual cruelty to women; Elsa is pulled back and forth like a prize to be won, to be possessed by the man with the better aim and fists. Yet it seemed to me that Peckinpah is not oblivious to the misogyny, and I got a definite sense that the screenplay was split into two halves. The first half is the traditional western, where all Heck needed was a good ass-whuppin’ to learn to mind his manners around the ladies. But the second half of the script is the gritty reality of the Acid West, where women are cattle to be fought over, and romance a contest between alpha males. The concluding melancholy of the Ride the High Country signals the two old men’s exhaustion with this order, their lives just as ruined as Elsa’s.

Ride the High Country was magnificently shot by Lucien Ballard on location in Mammoth Lake, Branson Canyon, and the Inyo National Forest in California. In one surprising scene for 1962, Steve upbraids Heck for littering, and makes the boy pick up his trash. The beautiful vistas contrast perfectly with the grimy mining town, which points to an unmistakable environmentalist sensibility in the film.

Ride the High Country is essential viewing to understand the origins of the Acid Western, as well as an opportunity to witness Peckinpah starting to hit his stride. The film’s conflicted tone, unpredictable story, and jarring pace makes for fascinating viewing. Ride the High Country is a critical classic because it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, an Acid Western disguised as a traditional western.