:01:01
or the most action-type
scenes in the movie.
:01:04
The cast is a mixture of American lead,
:01:08
Italian actors,
Spanish actors, West Germans.
:01:10
This is an Italian-Spanish-West
German coproduction,
:01:14
and each wanted a slice
of the action with the cast.
:01:17
Here's a direct James Bond reference.
:01:19
The iris looking down onto the horseman.
:01:23
James Bond had been successful
in Italy, and you could say
:01:26
part of the impetus for this film is
to bring Bond together with the Western,
:01:30
to turn it into a mid-1960s
grown-up kind of Western
:01:34
that would appeal to the audience
for James Bond movies.
:01:45
Shot in Techniscope, known as
the poor man's CinemaScope,
:01:48
a two-perforation system where you
printed two frames for the price of one.
:01:52
It was quite difficult to use,
and encouraged the use
:01:56
of either long shots or extreme close-ups,
:01:59
which, of course, is one of the technical
innovations of the Italian Western.
:02:08
In the shooting script, the movie
begins with a map of the Rio Grande,
:02:13
or the Río Bravo, as Mexicans call it,
:02:15
with northern Mexico
and the southern United States.
:02:18
And it's 1872, New Mexico. You see
the water, you see the mule's feet.
:02:24
You see the rider go across
the water, and his name is Ray.
:02:28
He's a Confederate sergeant.
And you see him steal a poncho
:02:31
off a hatless Mexican peon
who's having a swim in the Rio Grande.
:02:36
He puts on the poncho, cut,
and then the movie begins.
:02:39
But in the final version, it's much more
enigmatic, and more iconic as a costume,
:02:44
because you don't know why he's wearing
it, but he looks at home in Mexico.
:02:50
This sequence was shot
in Almería, in southern Spain,
:02:53
at a place called Cortijo el Sotillo,
at San Jose, east of Almería,
:02:58
and it looks much the same now
as it did then. This is an actual place.