Johnny Yuma

For every Clint Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef that became international stars because of the spaghetti western craze of the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were many others who never quite hit it as big.  There were over 500 spaghetti westerns made, and someone had to star in them, right? So as I mentioned in my review of 1966's The Texican (and a few others probably), has-been stars and up and coming actors often turned to Europe for film roles. One of those was American actor Mark Damon, a supporting player in Hollywood who through a dozen or so spaghetti westerns got more stardom than he ever would have back in the states.

None of Damon's ventures into the Italian westerns are considered true classics, including 1966's Johnny Yuma, an entertaining if unspectacular western. See enough westerns (or any genre for that matter), and you're going to start seeing the same stories over and over again with a few tweaks here and there.  What separates the 'been there, seen that' from the unique is being able to put a new spin on those things you have seen in the past.  Director Romolo Guerrieri does just enough different to make this spaghetti western worth watching.

Riding west after receiving a letter from his uncle with a request to run the family ranch, gunslinger Johnny Yuma (Damon) looks to have hit the jackpot.  But as he nears the ranch, he finds a wanted poster for the man who killed his uncle.  Johnny smells a rat and is convinced that something else is going on.  He's right.  His uncle's young wife, Samantha (Rosalba Neri), conspired with her brother, Pedro (Luigi Vannucchi) to murder Johnny's uncle and set someone else up in the process. Avenging his uncle's death and getting the ranch back in the process, Johnny has to tangle with a small army of gunmen Samantha sent after him in hopes of finishing him off.  The gunmen are one worry, but an infamous gunfighter, Linus Carradine (American TV actor Lawrence Dobkin), is also on his trail.

The main characters in spaghetti westerns allowed for certain extravagances in behavior and wardrobe -- Clint Eastwood's poncho, Yul Brynner's cigar-filled magazines, and many others -- but Damon is duded up to look like the ultimate gay caballero to me.  It isn't Damon's fault, but for starters Johnny Yuma isn't the greatest character.  He's not quite the steely-eyed killer and not a comedic punchline, instead he's somewhere in between. He's always wearing bright shirts (red, yellow, green), a vest with what looks like silver conches as buttons, the shirts are unbuttoned down to his stomach to show off his hairy chest, and he wears a silver dollar on a chain around his neck. I'm not saying anything, but...I'm just saying.  Still, Damon is the least of the movie's concerns.  He makes the most of the character that requires him to kill a lot of baddies, bed down a few ladies, and tear up when the little kid dies.

Criticisms of spaghetti westerns are all over the place, too violent, too stupid, too much humor, feels like an American western.  Oddly enough, all those criticisms are valid for this one movie.  It's all those complaints rolled into one movie! The violence isn't graphic, but in the finale Johnny and Carradine (differences pushed aside and teamed up) gun down wave after wave of nameless henchmen. On top of that, Johnny manages to bounce around the abandoned village like a kid on a sugar high getting the villain to empty his gun.  He also gets a cowardly Mexican sidekick (Fidel Gonzales) who is apparently around for laughs. The story does feel like an American western, but in a good way. And that's where the positive recommendation comes in.

In westerns, women are too often used as bait for the hero to save. Helpless, whiny, and all around unnecessary. There's two solutions in my mind, make them strong, heroic characters on their own, or the more fun option...make them villains.  Neri's Samantha is a great example of what a female villain in a western can be.  This is where the movie rises above the norm of what's so often in run-of-the-mill westerns.  It's Samantha pulling the strings on all the dupes around her as her plan comes together.  In the vein of a Lee Van Cleef character, Dobkin is also a bright spot as the aged gunfighter Carradine.  He's a good counter to Damon's Yuma in the same way Van Cleef was to Eastwood in For a Few Dollars More.  I still don't understand why Dobkin and Damon switch holsters midway through the story other than the story requires some general confusion, but there's too much else going on to linger there.

Now for all the fun little elements that make these spaghetti westerns -- even the bad ones -- memorable.  Composer Nora Orlandi turns in a solid score that resembles a Morricone score, but not in the obvious knock-off fashion so many other composers use. There is also a truly awful theme song (listen HERE) that is so downright bad that it ends up being great.  I defy you not to have it rattling around in your head in the days following your first watch.  It's that good kind of awful, the song where you know you shouldn't like it, but do anyways.  The Almerian locations are wide-ranging with some familiar spots around every corner.  So how do I rate it? Not a particularly good western, but an entertaining one.  Barely gets a positive rating, but barely still counts.

Johnny Yuma (1966): ** 1/2 /****