Cemetery Without Crosses

A spaghetti Western with French flavorings, director-star Robert Hossein's 1969 Franco-Italian co-production (aka The Rope and the Colt) was shot in Almeria, Spain. Hossein stars as Manuel, a retired gunman, with Michèle Mercier costarring as Maria, a widowed frontier wife who lures Manuel back into business to take revenge on the ruthless clan that murdered her husband after failing to drive the man off his land. This is a classic Italian Western theme, but here the vengeance is soaked in loss and regret, and Manuel carries out the retribution without emotion: just a blank-faced sense of purpose and eyes full of melancholy. The images and sounds are genre familiar: close-ups of pensive faces and loaded guns; a desolate, sunbaked landscape; an unreal soundtrack of post-dubbed dialogue; and the exaggerated stock sound effects of boot heels on floorboards, guns being cocked and fired, and a lonely wind howling just outside. Long sequences here play out with nary a word spoken, only shifting glances and guarded expressions, and the score echoes the style of the Italian composers with some lovely Spanish guitar carrying the melody. It's both a satisfying evocation of the classic spaghetti Western and an interesting variation, with a sense of doom right out of French gangster dramas. Although well-mastered, the film does features some visible damage and chemical degradation in isolated sequences. Presented with the both the original Italian and English-dubbed soundtracks, extras include new and archival interviews, an excerpt from the French TV series Cinema on the film, and a booklet. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)