La resa dei conti (The Big Gundown). 1967. Italy/Spain. Directed by Sergio Sollima. Screenplay by Sollima, Sergio Donati. With Lee Van Cleef, Tomas Milian, Walter Barnes. In Italian; English subtitles. DCP. 110 min.
One of the great, unapologetically brutal Spaghetti Westerns, Sergio Solima’s The Big Gundown was released in the same year as Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and Sergio Corbucci’s Django, and suffered brutal cuts of its own before a recent restoration brought the director’s vision to light. Lee Van Cleef, his face fixed in scowling disdain, got his first starring role as the stoic bounty hunter who discovers he may be after the wrong man, a Mexican peasant accused of raping and murdering a child. Based on a notably progressive story by Franco Solinas and Fernando Morandi, who also collaborated on The Battle of Algiers and Mr. Klein, The Big Gundown also features a genuinely chilling score of clashing brass, percussive piano, and electronic noise by Ennio Morricone, with Cristy unforgettably shrieking “Never! Never! Never!” in the film’s title sequence song, “Run Man Run.”