Hannie Caulder

Raquel Welch plays a frontier widow on a revenge mission to kill the scurvy trio of bank-robbing Clemens brothers (Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin, and Jack Elam) who murdered her husband and raped her in this 1971 offering from director Burt Kennedy. Shot in Spain in a setting of sun-baked desolation, Hannie Caulder is a confused hybrid of spaghetti Western and Peckinpah bloodbath, with awkward slow-motion shootouts that play like a bad imitation of The Wild Bunch. Along the way, some bizarre black humor related to a string of botched robberies by the Clemens trio is thrown in for good measure. Robert Culp brings a little class to the production as Thomas Luther Price, a cultured bounty hunter who trains Hannie in the art of killing, and Christopher Lee is Bailey, a reclusive gunsmith with a philosophical approach to his craft. Kennedy wrote some winning Westerns during the 1950s and directed his share of lighthearted comic entries in the genre (notably Support Your Local Sheriff), but he loses control of this one in a cacophony of styles and attitudes that ends up a grim mess. Not recommended. (S. Axmaker)[Blu-ray/DVD Review—Nov. 29, 2016—Olive, 85 min., R, DVD: $34.95, Blu-ray: $39.95—Making its latest appearance on DVD and Blu-ray, 1971's Hannie Caulder is presented with a nice transfer and a DTS-HD mono soundtrack on the Blu-ray release. Extras include audio commentary by filmmaker Alex Cox, a “Win or Lose: Tigon Pictures” making-of featurette with film historian Sir Christopher Frayling (22 min.), an “Exploitation or Redemption?” segment with film scholar Ben Sher (12 min.), and a “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance” essay by film critic Kim Morgan. Bottom line: this minor Western receives the red carpet treatment from Olive.]