Duel in the Eclipse (1968)

Ross Logan (Lang Jeffries) returns home to find that a gang, led by Carranza (Fernando Sancho) has taken over a nearby ranch and killed his brother. He decides to get revenge. The rest of the plot is reasonably straightforward, but it involves Carranza’s three main henchmen: Corbin, Charley Fair (Spaghetti Western regular Aldo Sambrell) and Tom Leather (who’s having an affair with Carranza’s girlfriend).

Most notable for a leopard-skin (or possibly Jaguar-skin – I’m not 100% clear on my big cats!) poncho, there’s actually a lot to enjoy here. There’s some good melodrama (the henchman in love with the girlfriend and the bandits’ internal rivalries). Some action. An eclipse. An effective build-up on tension towards the final gunfight (in the eclipse). Although obviously not high budget, the film never looks cheap, except for some overused repeated zooming just before the climax which goes on for about a minute continuously zooming in and out of peoples faces and turns out to be less dramatic than they hoped at the time.

The main weaknesses of the film is the main character (or atleast his dubbing) which sounds very macho but a bit monotone. We also never really feel he’s in danger at any point. There’s also a slightly odd aspect of threatened sexual violence between on the henchmen and a peasant girl, which he keeps saying “sleep with me or I’ll rape you” but the threat never seems very convincing. It’s not really a flaw – just a slightly odd dynamic that seems slightly like the film-makers decided to dodge the issue for (self-)censorship reasons. Or possibly the villain really does want the girl to genuinely want him, but is going about it in all the wrong ways. The latter would put a more interesting twist on his character, but is probably writing too much into it.

Multiple versions of the film exist with different aspects cut – the version I saw has an alternate take of a bathing scene with one of the heroines to remove some aspects targeted at the gentleman viewer. I watched it from Youtube where the quality is watchable but not fantastic.