Film Review: Danger: Diabolik (1968)

I'm not going to say that Danger: Diabolik is a fine film. No film starring John Philip Law, an ambulatory totem pole of an actor, can stake any claim to greatness. It is, however, a wonderful B-movie, even a cult film, and what makes Diabolik special is something that's representative of Italian cinema of the 1960s: a frantic desire to startle and delight the audience with over-the-top visual elements and eccentric soundtracks.

Diabolik (a character from a popular series of Italian comic books) is an anti-hero masterthief who steals from the rich and gives to himself. He wears a ridiculous latex catsuit, kills policemen who get in his way, has an eye-popping underground lair and an equally eye-popping girlfriend, Eva, who wears outfits a stripper would blanch at. The plot has Diabolik stealing jewels and a gold shipment, running afoul of a gangster, and rescuing Eva from a kidnapper. As befits something based on a comic, the action is fast and silly, and the story whizzes by with only a passing wave at logic and the laws of physics. A great many contemporary superhero movies could learn a thing or two from Danger: Diabolik. Here's a taste of what's on offer in the film:

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Lots of critics point to the American cinema of the 1970s as a golden age in filmmaking. Certainly from the point of view of storytelling, directors such as Hal Ashby, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin, Francis Coppola, Bob Rafelson, Sidney Lumet and the like set new standards in what kinds of stories could be told, the honest depiction of sex and violence, and the use of actors who looked like the man or woman on the street rather than groomed movie stars. But for my money the Italian films of the previous decade (with some spillage into the early '70s) were a more true golden age. Italian filmmakers of this era were busy playing with the language of film, finding new ways to use all the tools in the filmmaker's utility belt from sound to costuming to set design to music to cinematography (here's a link to my related post on "gesamtkunstwerk" films).

Federico Fellini would be the poster boy for Italian films of this period. His films are studies in artfully combining all the visual and aural qualities available to a director. If you were asked to think of a memorable moment from any Fellini film from this period you'd most likely recall a scene with extravagant sensory appeal. Ask the same question of, say, a Coppola film from the '70s and you'll most likely think of a scene that's important to the plot or defines a character. To put it another way, American directors were novelists, Italian directors were conceptual artists. Check out this "fashion" show from Fellini's Roma:

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Fellini was far from the only Italian director creating films that used everything in the filmmaker's toolkit. Sergio Leone redefined and deconstructed the western almost entirely through his use of visuals and Ennio Morricone's iconic music. As with Fellini, Leone's most memorable sequences in the Dollars films are those that combine bold cinematography and even bolder music, such as this one:




What the two clips show is that Italian films of that era often seemed to put the cinematography and music in competition, with each element trying to outdo the other in originality and power. American and English films of the time generally don't do this; the music supports the visuals in these films, whereas in Italian cinema it sometimes seems the music is trying to elbow the visuals aside and vice versa. Composers like John Barry and Maurice Jarre composed soundtracks that complemented the film. Morricone, Riz Ortolani, Nino Rota and Carlo Rustichelli produced soundtracks so distinctive it was though they were daring the director to create visuals that lived up to the music.

Michaelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertulucci, Pier Pasolini and Elio Petri can be added to the list of Italian directors maximizing all the possibilities film has to offer, and that brings us to the question of why the Italians and not so much everyone else? I don't really have an answer for that, but I'll toss out a few theories. The first is that many Italian directors came to film after having attained success in other fields. Bertolucci, Pasolini and Fellini were writers first, Petri a political activist, and Mario Bava, the director of Danger: Diabolik, began as a painter. These were people who brought more to the party than a degree from a film school. And then there's Catholicism. Did the intense visual symbolism and pageantry of Catholic churches and religious processions create a strong appreciation for meaning and story transmitted entirely through visual means? Finally, there might be a technical reason for the visual strength of Italian films. It was customary in Italian cinema to "loop" or post-dub all the dialogue. This meant that directors didn't have to worry about the position of sound equipment when framing shots or mapping out camera movements; and because there weren't any flubbed lines to worry about, or time spent coaching actors on their line readings (actors were often told to just count out loud during on-camera dialogue scenes, all the director needed to see was their lips moving), more time could be spent on the look of the film.

Contemporary Italian cinema is a shadow of its former self, but recent films such as Il Divo (2008), Le Quattro Volte (2010)  and Reality (2012) show that there's still some artistic life left in the industry.

Film Review: Django Unchained (2012)

Based on Django Unchained, it seems fair to say that Quentin Tarantino isn't interested in making films anymore, or at least not the kind that people have traditionally recognized as films. Django isn't so much a film as it is a loosely stitched together series of moments and bits that are meant to be appreciated by themselves, totally apart from any kind of coherent narrative. The audience for this kind of film? The  demographic that delights in discovering and chattering about tropes, meta moments, homages, genre references, and tributes to other films. If that's the kind of film you like Django is an absolute buffet of genre cliches and, dare I say it, tropes. For the rest of us this is a jaw-droppingly bad piece of filmmaking that goes on and on and on. There are so many things wrong with Django it's going to be easier just to narrow it down to a sampling of the things that annoyed me the most:

Talk is way too cheap

Early in his career Tarantino was justifiably praised for his dialogue. If you can be damned with faint praise, it appears that in Quentin's case you can also be damned with too much. He's turned into a scriptwriting windbag. Scene after scene has characters talking at such length it would be more accurate to call this script a Hansard. Not only are most scenes grotesquely overlong, some are completely gratuitous.

It's a western?

Django is supposed to be some kind of tribute/homage to spaghetti westerns, but in truth the story turns out be more of a drawing room comedy of mayhem. The key visual element in any western is the great outdoors. The idea of vast, unpopulated spaces was one of the reasons for the popularity of westerns in small, overpopulated Europe, hence the rise of the spaghetti western. Tarantino has no eye or enthusiasm for shooting outdoors. Just to let us know we're watching a western he has Django and Schultz ride past a herd of buffalo. OK, fine, there's that box ticked. And then several scenes later we see them go past a herd of elk. Oh, right, I almost forgot I was watching a western. That's the extent of the director's enthusiasm for western landscapes. Most of the film takes place in smallish rooms and the tone in the latter half is more blacksploitation than western.

Foghorn Leghorn was a technical advisor on the film

Yes, most of the actors seem to have taken voice lessons from Foghorn Leghorn, especially Leonardo DiCaprio. And Don Johnson gets to play a plantation owner in full Colonel Sanders regalia. This is as subtle as things get in the film.

Guns don't kill people, massive, spectacular blood loss does

If I sit down to watch one of the Saw films or something by Dario Argento I expect and demand buckets of blood. But a western? For no clear reason Tarantino films his shootouts as though they were scenes in a horror movie. When bullets hit flesh in this universe they release a geyser of blood that travels yards. I know, I know, it's a homage to Peckinpah, but he didn't make blood a star in its own right.

Why are there so many empty beds in the Old Actors' Home?

I can answer that: it's because Tarantino dragooned Tom Wopat, Franco Nero, Russ Tamblyn, Lee Horsley, and Bruce Dern into making cameo appearances. Why? So film geeks can play Spot The Former Star. It's a lot like the Where's Waldo books but without the popcorn. These actors don't add anything to the film except a distraction.

A Peculiar Institution

Believe it or not, some critics and Tarantino apologists/fans have been furrowing their brows and saying that Django delivers a strong lesson about the evils of slavery. Well, if you've been living in a cave for the last 100 years or so it might be news that slavery was a bad thing, but for the rest of us it's a yawn-inducing revelation. And Tarantino isn't really interested in any kind of serious look at slavery; his interest in slavery only extends to referencing tawdry exploitation flicks on the subject like Mandingo and Drum.

Miscegenation, please

For someone who worships at the temple of genre films, the nastier and cruder the better, Tarantino proves to be something of a prude. He's happy to show wholesale quantities of graphic violence, but sex and nudity is something he seems uncomfortable with. All of his films are G-rated when it comes to sex. T & A is a big part of all the genres referenced in Django, especially the slave-themed ones, but Tarantino skates right around some obvious opportunities for naked fun. How boring.

Hot Shots: Part Trois

Remember those parody film franchises like Scary Movie and Hot Shots? Tarantino must have decided to honour that genre as well because that's the only explanation for a farcical sequence with Don Johnson and Jonah Hill (yes, Jonah Hill) as members of a Klan-like posse that gets into an argument about headgear. The scene is supposed to be farcical and off-kilter, just like some of the conversations in Pulp Fiction, but it's written and filmed so badly you have to wonder if the Wayans brothers weren't in charge of this part of the film. 

White/Star Power

For a film that's supposed to have a strong black power vibe, at the end of the day it's mostly about the white characters. Jamie Foxx as Django gets to shoot a lot of white folks, but it's Christoph Waltz and DiCaprio who get almost all the dialogue, and Waltz's character is very clearly the brains of the outfit. 

Draw!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't western action sequences have their own particular grammar and tradition? Not in this one. The shootouts owe more to Scarface and John Woo than Sergio Leone. And they're dull. No style, no imagination; Django just draws his gun and mows down scores of blood bags southerners.

Does Tarantino have a Screen Actors Guild card?

If he does, someone please take it away from him. Quentin makes one of his unfortunate acting appearances towards the end (he gets blowed up real good) and this time he treats us to an Australian accent. Why an Australian accent? Don't ask, because you might also begin to ask what a German bounty hunter is doing in the Old West.

There's one good thing in Django and it's Samuel L. Jackson. He plays an elderly, evil house servant and what little wit and energy the film has is provided by him. But that's always the case with Jackson, isn't it?

"You've Had Your Six"

I feel I should write something to mark the 50th anniversary of the James Bond movies, but the internet's already clogged with lists of favourite Bond girls/films/gadgets/actors/locations so I'll keep things simple by looking at a scene in Dr. No that marks a turning point in film history and also helps explain the cachet of the Bond character. Here it is:



Pretty cold-blooded, eh? This was shocking stuff for 1962. Up until this moment heroes did not shoot unarmed villains, even the ones who were determined to kill them. Bond even gives his enemy a second shot for good measure, and it's a shot in the back, no less. And what makes this scene even more unusual for the time (and became a hallmark of the Bond series) is that James makes a quip as he kills his would-be assassin. "You've had your six" is a cricket reference, which makes this witticism at once one of the driest and also the most English in film history.

This one brief scene was, with its combination of lethal viciousness and humour, a watershed moment in film history. It was the first depiction of a hero who is absolutely ruthless and even cruel. The unwritten rule prior to Bond was that a hero always "played the game" more honourably than the enemy; unarmed men aren't to be shot, especially in the back, and levity has no place at a killing. Bond's role as a remorseless jester of death struck a chord with audiences, and I think the answer to why that happened lies in World War II. Bond is the personification of the character of that war. My dad and John F. Kennedy had only two things in common: they both loved James Bond and both were WW II vets. The things they saw in the war were never shown in films. When men died in war movies there was no blood, no viscera, and the Allies followed the rules of the Geneva Conventions to the letter. My dad and J.F.K., like millions of other vets, knew better. They knew first hand that war was about killing that was without remorse or regret and by any means possible. Bond was not fighting WW II, but the manner in which he waged his war against SPECTRE and SMERSH was an accurate reflection of what a large chunk of the viewing and reading public had experienced less than twenty years previously.

Bond's gallows humour also has its roots in the war. Thanks to some of the more recent histories of  WW II by writers such as Paul Fussell, Stephen Ambrose, and Max Hastings we have a better idea of how dehumanizing the war was for its participants. And one way they reacted to its horrors was to make fun of them. One of the great slaughters of WW II took place in the battle of the Falaise Pocket in Normandy, during which the entire German Army Group B was essentially wiped out. There were so many German dead they couldn't be buried, and the ones lying on the roads were simply driven over by Allied vehicles. My dad's unit drove through the pocket and he and his buddies, as he told me later, found the sight of pancaked Germans to be hilarious. Everyone took turns cracking bad jokes about the flattened enemy. And when he was part of a detail burying the dead the gags kept coming. The bodies, the ones not made wafer-thin by trucks and tanks, were bloated to an enormous size and their stomachs had to be pierced to release the gases before they could be moved. Cue the laugh track as Private Watson and the men manhandle blimp-like corpses emitting odours from Hell. So when Bond was cracking wise as he dispatched a baddie in some absurd way, what my dad and others were hearing was a very watered-down version of their own black humour.

The action hero as a pitiless, joke-spewing killing machine started with Bond, and soon became the norm for a great many other film heroes. The next in line was The Man With No Name character in Sergio Leone's westerns, although in those films the humour was more muted. In the ''80s and '90s Mel Gibson and Arnold Schwarzenegger built their careers around playing this kind of character.But divorced from the context of a war, these kinds of heroes begin to seem like homicidal maniacs, fantasy figures for sadists. As Bond celebrates 50 years in film, his main competition is represented by the Jason Bourne types: heroes who are more like hyper-efficient killing apps than flesh and blood people. There's something comforting in Bond having a taste for booze, games of chance, and casual sex. It makes him human. The soullessness of Bourne makes him less of a hero and more like one of the all-star villains Bond has bumped off over the years. And perhaps that's why Bond lives on and the other guys end up looking forward to doing cameos in the next The Expendables movie.

Film Review: Duck You Sucker (1971)

There comes a point when film directors, especially the best ones, begin repeating themselves. And some even end up producing unintentional parodies of their own work. David Lean fell to earth with Ryan's Daughter, an overblown, overproduced flop that brought an epic scale to a pipsqueak of a story. Fellini's final few films, especially And the Ship Sails On and City of Women, felt like clumsy homages to the Fellini style. And Stanley Kubrick's detached, cool style reached a spectacular dead end with Eyes Wide Shut, a film about sex that barely had a pulse. Duck You Sucker is Sergio Leone's swan song as a director of westerns. It's an ugly way to go.

In the Man With No Name films Leone redefined and deconstructed the western. He took a genre that was on its last legs and blended in some elements from folklore, mythology and religion, and then added a wholly original look and sound. But after three films there really wasn't a lot more Leone could do with the western. In Once Upon a Time in the West, his fourth western, Leone tried his hand at a film John Ford might have recognized, and ended up with something that doesn't satisfy fans of either director. Once looks good and sounds good, but the plot is ponderous, slow-moving and confused. It's really a film that's held together by a handful of striking set-pieces and one wickedly entertaining performance by Henry Fonda as the antithesis of every western character he'd ever played.

With Duck You Sucker it's clear Leone is running up the white flag on his enthusiasm for the western. Even the ever-reliable Ennio Morricone stubs his toe with a score that veers wildly between cloyingly sentimental and perversely odd. Duck is unashamedly political in its ambitions. The story is set during the Mexican Revolution and centres on Juan, a roguish brigand who leads a gang consisting of his numerous sons. Juan teams up with an ex-IRA bomber to crack open a bank, but they're sidetracked into fighting for the revolutionary forces. Leone takes the view that the little guy (represented by Juan) always gets screwed in any kind of revolution, no matter who is leading the forces of revolt or what their aims are. This is an unsophisticated and unoriginal idea, and Leone certainly doesn't develop it with any kind of imagination. It's clear this aspect of the film was his reaction to the stormy political climate in Europe, and Italy in particular.

Politics is only one of the problems in Duck You Sucker. Rod Steiger as Juan delivers one of the hammiest performances in his long and jambon-filled career. His performance also moves him into a tie with Al Pacino in Scarface and Speedy Gonzales for worst attempt at a Spanish accent. James Coburn, as John the IRA bomber, does a Lucky Charms Irish accent, which is bad, but not as awful as the flashbacks he finds himself in. These flashbacks give us John's backstory, which is presented without dialogue but with a lot of soft focus and the worst music Morricone ever created. The backstory is a grisly bit of sentimentality: poor John has to shoot his best friend who's a traitor to the cause and is also one-third of a romantic menage a trois he and John are involved in. The third member is a girl, just in case you were wondering.

If the film has a saving grace it's that Leone does manage to work his visual magic in several set-pieces.  Some things get blown up real good, and there some crowd scenes around a railway station that are brilliantly shot and choreographed, but beyond that Duck You Sucker feels like the work of someone who's going through the motions. At this point in time Leone was only competing against himself and it clearly wasn't a fight he had much energy for. Click here for my review of Leone at his peak with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Film Review: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

This isn't going to be a full-on review of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; let's just take it as a given that you've seen it, you love it, and you agree that it fits into any list of the top one hundred films of all time. An aspect of GBU that hasn't had much, or any, recognition is that the plot isn't just about three men hunting for hidden gold. That's just the top layer to the story. On a symbolic level GBU is about Christ and the Devil fighting for Tuco's soul. If you've finished snorting in derision, I'll continue.

Let's begin with the naming of the characters. Only Tuco, the Ugly, is given an actual name. The Bad is called Angel Eyes, and the Good is named Blondie. The last two have been given symbolic names. Angel Eyes is a reference to Satan as a fallen angel, and Blondie, well, who's always presented in religious paintings as being blonde? The good and bad references seem obvious, but why is Tuco identified as ugly? What does ugly mean in this context? Eli Wallach's certainly no oil painting, but what I'm guessing it refers to is that Tuco, like all mankind, is living in original sin; he's made in God's image, but is marred, made ugly, by orginal sin. Sergio Leone pretty much annouces what he's up to off the top with freeze frames on each character that are accompanied by a caption identifying them as good, bad or ugly. Once he's done this then you know this isn't going to be your average western.

Angel Eyes' satanic character is made explicit early in the film when, after killing two people who've each hired him to kill the other, he remarks to the last victim that when he's paid he always sees a job through to the end. According to folklore one must never do a deal with the Devil because he'll always find a way to turn the tables on you, and that's exactly what we see happen when we first meet Angel Eyes.

Blondie's credentials as Christ are even more apparent. In fact, at one point Angel Eyes refers to him as Tuco's guardian angel, and, just on cue, the sound of a heavenly choir rises in the background. When Tuco takes the injured Blondie to a monastery/hospital the room he's put in conveniently has a painting of the cruxifiction just outside it, which Tuco prays in front of for a brief moment. Blondie's holiness becomes more explicit once the action moves to the Civil War battle by the river. Blondie is appalled by the loss of men and tells the dying commanding officer (to whom he administers a kind of last rites by giving him a bottle of booze) to expect "good news" soon. He and Tuco blow up the bridge and thus end the battle. Blondie's Christ-like nature becomes explicit shortly after he and Tuco cross the river. Blondie goes into a ruined church and comforts a dying soldier by giving him a cigarillo and his coat. The way this scene is filmed suggests that this isn't just an act of random kindness, this is to be taken as an act of divine mercy.

Tuco, despite acting in a decidedly unholy way, is quick to use religious imagery. He crosses himself virtually every time he comes across a dead body, and he tells Blondie that when he, Tuco, is hanging at the end of a rope he can feel the Devil "biting his ass." In one of the film's key moments, Tuco is about to hang Blondie in revenge for having abandoned him in the desert. The sound of artillery is rumbling in the background and Tuco comments that there was also thunder heard when Judas hanged himself. Tuco's split nature is shown during a brilliant scene with his brother Pablo, a priest, at the monastery. Tuco greets his brother with warmth, but his brother gives him a very un-Christian cold shoulder. In the same scene Tuco lets his brother know that his choice of a life of crime was not his first choice, and that Pablo's decision to become a priest was a form of cowardice. The scene leaves us knowing that Tuco is, to a degree, morally conflicted.

The fight for Tuco's soul first becomes obvious in the scam Blondie and he run. Blondie turns Tuco in for the reward money and then shoots away the rope when Tuco's about to be hung. Each time Tuco is about to face death a list of his crimes is read out by the local sherriff. It's as though he's facing a roll call of his sins, or, because he's allowed himself to be put in this position, he's confessing his sins. And after each confession he's granted forgiveness by Blondie/Christ who shoots the rope. Blondie ends the relationship, and on a symbolic level it's because he thinks Tuco has received a moral lesson about his life of crime.

The final shootout in the cemetery brings all the religious themes to a head. To begin with we have the gold buried in a grave, a clear warning that worldly wealth equals death. Angel Eyes is killed by Blondie and slides into an open grave. Not content with having killed Angel Eyes, Blondie then shoots his fallen hat and gun into the grave. It looks very much as though Angel Eyes is being cast back down to Hell. Blondie then makes Tuco put a rope around his own neck and stand on a cross marking a grave. Blondie then rides off. Tuco is left perched precariously on a cross, staring down at bags of gold lying on the ground. The message seems obvious: as long as Tuco stays on the Holy Cross he stays alive; if he leaves the cross for the gold, for worldliness, he dies, and not just in this world. The juxtaposition of shots showing Tuco's desperation to stay on the cross and his view of the gold bags couldn't make this any clearer. After Blondie's judged that Tuco has absorbed yet another lesson on the error of his ways, he emerges from hiding and shoots away the rope. Tuco lands directly on the gold and then we get a freeze frame in which each of the three characters is once again identified as good, bad and ugly. Leone certainly knew how to drive a point home.

It's not as though Leone didn't mix symbolism into his other spaghetti westerns. In A Fistful of Dollars the family that's been split apart by Ramon is clearly meant to be the Holy Family. Leone also throws in some mythological elements when he has Joe, Clint Eastwood's character, hidden in a coffin and carried in a wagon driven by a Charon-like figure (a coffin maker) to the Underworld (an abandoned mine shaft). There he finds safety and forges a magical shield (an iron breastplate), which he wears when he returns to the land of the living. Like any god his arrival on Earth is announced with thunder and lightning (several sticks of dynamite), and Ramon is defeated because his hero-like ability to hit a man's heart with every rifle shot can't beat Joe's magical shield.

I don't think Leone meant for any of the religious or mythological references in his westerns to be taken too seriously. He used these themes and symbols to give his stories a subliminal resonance and weight. Without these elements his films would be more stylish versions of standard American westerns. One proof of this is Once Upon a Time in the West, which feels less substantial than Leone's other westerns because it omits religious and mythological motifs. Instead we get a rather muddy plot that contains some anti-capitalist rhetoric and not much else. The anti-capitalist theme was a common element in a lot of Italian films at the time, and I'd guess that Bernardo Bertolucci's involvement in the script probably had a lot to do with that. 

I may be deluded or off-base with some of my arguments about the religious content of GBU, but give it another watch and see if my thesis doesn't hold up. The two clips below make up the final shootout from the film and I think it proves my point(s). The second clip has bonus Hebrew sub-titles! Here endeth the lesson.

Related posts:

Film Review: Duck You Sucker 

Film Review: The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972)

By 1972 the western, as a film genre, was in palliative care, done in by a deficit of original ideas and by the public's growing taste for cop and disaster movies. European directors like Sergio Leone had taken westerns as far as they could go in terms of epic scope and allegory, while Hollywood countered with a stream of gritty, realistic westerns, the so-called revisionist westerns. Titles that fall under the latter category include Will Penny, Little Big Man, Soldier Blue, Bad Company, and, to a lesser degree, The Wild Bunch. The hallmark of the revisionist western is the debunking of the heroic, American expansionist ideal of John Wayne westerns. Revisionist westerns are sympathetic to Indians, show cowboys as skanky and feral, and present settlers and townspeople as racist and greedy.

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid is firmly in the revisionist camp. The writer and director was Philip Kaufman, who'd go on to greater fame with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Right Stuff. The title raid was the last bank robbery of the James-Younger gang, but Kaufman's focus isn't so much on the robbery as it is on more contemporary issues. In 1972 the U.S. was still waist deep in the Vietnam War and its inner cities were becoming war zones. In Raid, Kaufman offers up a thesis that America's taste for violence has deep roots. The gang and the townspeople of Northfield are shown to be equally callous and bloodthirsty. Jesse James murders a kindly old woman just to acquire her clothes for a disguise, and after a posse of Northfield citizens accidentally gets in a firefight with a posse from another town they take pride in having inflicted casualties on the other posse. The philosophy of the film is summed up beautifully during a baseball game that's half brawl, half sporting event. One of Northfield's leading citizens tells Cole Younger that baseball is now America's national sport, and Cole politely corrects him by saying, "Shooting is America's national sport and always will be." Cole then blasts the baseball out of the air, immediately ending the game.

Raid has an appropriately gritty, dirty look, and the gang members range from sociopathic to feeble-minded. Jesse James (Robert Duvall) is presented as a scheming psychopath who has a bottomless hatred for Northerners. Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson) is the brains of the gang, and has, despite his hardcore criminality, a very American innocence and delight when exposed to new sights and marvels. The acting is excellent throughout. It's no surprise that Duvall is good, but Robertson's acting is a bit of surprise. Robertson was always the bland utility infielder of leading men, but here he gives a charming, eccentric performance that's a perfect counterpoint to Duvall's homicidal Jesse James. The film's main drawback is a series of cutaways to a railway car full of Pinkerton men who've been hired to hunt down James and Younger. These scenes are badly shot and turn out to be irrelvant to the plot. I was going to attach Raid's trailer to this review, but it's absolutely stuffed with spoilers. Instead, here's a still from the film showing the aftermath of the raid.