Last Updated on April 20, 2021 by rob
In the Old West an elegantly attired contract killer known as Mr Silver (Peter Lee Lawrence) is hired by the owners of local banks to find and eliminate the masked outlaws who’ve been robbing stagecoaches and who on their last raid ruthlessly murdered all the passengers.
Well-plotted and pacy Euro-Western featuring some rough and tumble stunt-work in which none of the actors appear to have been doubled and offering an excellent English dub. German actor Peter Lee Lawrence (the young husband seen gunned down in flashback by Indio in Leone’s For A Few Dollars More) is the stern, serious and unfailingly polite lead (‘Sorry, Ma’am’, he informs a bar hostess before decking her with a punch) whose fighting and marksmanship skills are so sharp and stylish (he kills his victims with a silver bullet) he seems almost too damn good for the ruthless killers he’s up against.
Lorenzo Gicca Palli’s screenplay spins some smart twists once the robbers realise they’ve been betrayed by their own boss and it isn’t just Mr Silver they’ve got to worry about but a mysterious assassin who’s knocking them off one by one. So Silver isn’t the only one hunting the outlaws and the motives of at least one of the supporting characters here proves a genuine surprise. If the production values are a touch ragged (the bruises Silver receives from a beating simply disappear between scenes, there’s a lousy day-for-night shot and a crudely animated title sequence hilariously derivative of the one in Fistful Of Dollars), well, who cares? It’s all part of the fun.
I liked the film a lot and in part I liked it because it has none of the tongue in cheek parody or cynicism of the Leone films. Instead it treats everything with the same stern, unironic seriousness as Silver’s character (at one point our hero joins a bar fight just because someone spilled his drink!) and Brescia’s unflashy, functional direction is about as far from Leone’s exaggerated stylistics as you can get. That might make it sound dull but it isn’t at all thanks to Peter Lee Lawrence’s engaging performance and an unusually sturdy plot. The film moves so quickly that the relative black and white nature of the characters never seems a drag.
