The Specialists (1969)

While Sergio Corbucci made many of my favourite spaghetti westerns, this isn’t really one of them. The story consists of Hud (Johnny Hallyday) returning to his hometown to try to track down the killers of his brother, who was framed for robbing a bank in quite a convoluted manner.

There’s a number of problems with the film, but the most important one is that simply too much is going on and and most of it isn’t followed through. On top of the basic revenge plot there’s a gang of Mexican bandits, that only appear comparatively briefly in a few places; four hippies, that don’t really do anything except for an odd diversion at the end where they try to take over the town; a Sheriff that wants the entire town disarmed, but the character remains somewhat undefined beyond that; and a promising introduction where the local dignitaries bicker about who is responsible for lynching Hud’s brother which is promptly forgotten for the rest of the film.

A secondary problem is that very little is explained very well. Exactly what did happen with Hallyday’s brother remains slightly unclear (at least on the first viewing), although it definitely involves Virginia (Françoise Fabian) the seductive widow who owns the bank and has all the men in town under her thumb. Other details are also vague: Hud’s one ally is Sheba (Sylvie Fennec) who may have had something to do with his brother in the past, but who knows what, and who refers to the brother’s assassin as “father” but it’s hinted that he isn’t, but who knows why. All of these details are clearly known to Hud but not the audience and it doesn’t work to the film’s advantage.

One the plus side Johnny Hallyday is reasonably credible in the lead role, the scenery – the Dolomites in Italy – is impressive (it’s somewhat surprising to me that more spaghetti westerns didn’t use this setting), and there are some other nice touches (I quite liked the chain-mail armour Hud wears). The film is an interesting curiosity but nobody should go into it expecting classic Corbucci.

The version I saw euphemistically “fell of the internet” with English subtitles and either (mostly) Italian audio or mostly English audio with significant chunks of (mostly) Italian filling in the gaps. Given the composite sources it’s reasonably high quality and I suspect is a compressed version of the official Italian and French DVDs (which have no English audio).

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