El Puro (1969)

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

"La taglia è tua... l'uomo l'ammazzo io" (1969), more commonly known as "El Puro", is a Spaghetti Western directed by Edoardo Mulargia. The plot is straightforward: the once infamous gunfighter "El Puro" (played by Robert Woods) is now a drunkard hunted by bandits for the $10,000 reward on his head. This looks to have been cheap to make, with limited interiors which are used quite a lot. But these sets look fairly realistic as they are filthy and grubby which gives in an authentic touch of the West. The camera-work by Antonio L. Ballesteros is mainly devoid of style, apart from a few crash-zooms. The editing is rough and hasty, with more than a few jarring cuts. The direction is more spirited, with a well staged gunfight and an excellently handled climax and manages to make some of the more slower scenes interesting enough at least to watch instead of skipping them and getting to the highlights. The acting is good in places, even if Robert Woods performance as "El Puro" is slightly disappointing after seeing his great role in "Black Jack" (1968), but Mario Brega, Marc Fiorini (as Ashborn Hamilton Jr.) and Maurizio Bonuglia acquit themselves well to there roles as the villains of the picture. All in all, you should enjoy it if you are a fan of the genre.

there's a reason this western has remained unknown and obscure. and the reason is that it stinks. uninspired, uninteresting, and unmemorable, this is a loooooooong slow trudge to nowhere. the 90 minutes feel twice as long. i kept expecting something to happen that will validate my patience, but zip. zilch. nada. not much violence or action, no nudity, no memorable acting, no characters to buoy your interest. and your kid brother can write this kinda plot after watching a marathon session of old Hollywood B westerns. i wrote this review, so that you can benefit from my suffering and save your time.in case i didn't make it clear enough, AVOID IT! shoo, clear off...unless you're a masochist or a hard-core Western collector who must have every genre entry in his collection.rating: 2/10 (for a couple of beautiful faces in the cast, and some cinematography. and the 3 people who gave this film a '10' each are clearly sadistic jokers!)