The Deadly Trackers (1973)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

A very simple, old-fashioned Western about a man of peace destroyed on a trail of vengeance, with no particular nuance or grace and nothing to mark it as a product of the early 70s except lots of blood squibs. Still, DEADLY TRACKERS reminds us that in Hollywood, anything can happen. Even a Richard Harris-Al Lettieri buddy movie.Rod Taylor is a happy surprise as a brutal killer, unregenerate and nasty, unrecognizable from the pretty Englishman in GIANT who goes fishing for Elizabeth Taylor and ends up hooking - do you remember? - Carolyn Craig. William Smith's vicious idiot, Schoolboy, is perhaps his best acting work outside that monologue as Conan's father, and his fellow war hero Neville Brand is weird and big enough to wear a piece of train track instead of a hand, which is at least interesting, if unlikely. But Harris pretty much walks through this one, apparently numbed by all those underperforming Westerns that preceded it (though he can't make it all the way through this one without his MAN CALLED HORSE headband); maybe he saw that his career was headed for the rickety CASSANDRA CROSSING. And the wonderful Al Lettieri is handcuffed by a nice-guy role that disallows his greatest strengths: sadism, menace, barbarity.Gabriel Torres' photography is okay, but the story (by original director Sam Fuller and Lukas Heller) moves along in fits and starts, probably because its multiple other directors were fired by Harris, who manages not to appear drunk through most of the picture. TV director Barry Shear does a decent job with the final product; I'm not a big fan of Sam Fuller anyway and am not certain that the movie would have been better if he had been allowed to finish it. But Shear's (perhaps unwilling) choice of opening with a terrible, unnecessary V.O. scroll and dialog over "still" photos of town life, is a bizarre and not very good one. Then the action starts, and it's true 70s violence, with children's heads stomped by horses and women shot in the face so close to camera that blood spatters the lens. This is the kind of movie that made the MPAA rethink some of its decisions and reduce the violence quotient in PG pictures.The best thing about this movie is the music it appropriates from THE WILD BUNCH (a choice likely made by Warner Brothers due to budgetary concerns after the numerous headaches associated with its difficult star), and this great music isn't even appropriate - Jerry Fielding's epic score, itself reminiscent of Elmer Bernstein's work on MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, is ill-suited to an intimate, low-end quickie that would have been better served by a dirge.

The big surprise in The Deadly Trackers is Rod Taylor's emergence as one mean and nasty villain here. Although he had played a bad guy early in his career in Hell on Frisco Bay as a contract killer, the public was used to Rod as the civilized fellow bringing a sense of order to a future world in The Time Machine. He's anything, but civilized in The Deadly Trackers.Richard Harris is a sheriff with some rather strange notions about capture instead of killing in a lawless land. Rod Taylor and his gang rob the bank in Harris's town and kill the bank manager on a whim. Then when Harris tries to capture and use reason with Taylor, Harris's wife and son become dead also.That gives our sheriff a whole new outlook and he hunts the gang into Mexico where he teams up with a federale played by Al Lettieri who has all the ideas Harris used to have. This was the farewell performance of Al Lettieri and interesting that he went out as a good guy here. He created a great group of villains in The Godfather, McQ, Mr. Majestyk, and The Getaway. He was a great talent.Some attention was paid to the fact that Harris is an Irish sheriff and for that matter Rod Taylor is Australian. But America is in fact a nation of immigrants and this should be no stranger than Errol Flynn's emergence as a western star in the heyday of the studio.

Idealistic Sheriff turned vengeance-crazed whirlwind down Mexico way ( where as all Western fans know, anything goes). Richard Harris brings his unique (not to be confused with good) acting talents to the role. There's also Rod Taylor as the gross, ultra-violent and competent gang leader with Neville Brand complete with iron rail instead of a hand (yea, right!), William Smith doing one of his muscled, vacant-gazed idiot numbers and some black, dandyish gambler who I felt sorry for being subjected to the other gang members crap. The late Al Lettierri plays a decent, by the book Mexican Federale, which is a shame because he's much better at irrational, explosively violent sickos. A lot of hand-held camera work in this movie (and I don't just mean POV shots) gives it a low budget look, but the Mexican locales help out some. So why my interest in this film? Maybe it's just the shear down and dirty intensity with which Harris goes after that down and dirty gang. SPOILER- The scene where he throws an injured Lettierri through the Bar window, blasts the black gambler to smithereens and starts to kick a** and take names with the bar patrons is almost Apocalyptic. Rod Taylor exudes a very unpredictable, terrible menace in this film, too. Recommended for fans of sweaty westerns, but with no dubbed voiced Italian actors.

Although this western feature has much big name talent, it however fails in quality. The plot is thin.There is too much unnecessary violence. Direction is poor.