A Town Called Bastard

Shot in Spain with a motley cast and crew, starting with the striking image of Stella Stevens, beatifically asleep in a coffin and being driven in a hearse across the desert by a deaf-mute gunman (Sutton) to the little Mexican village where she intends to claim a corpse after killing the man who murdered her husband, this suffers from the worst excesses of the spaghetti Western. On the other hand, behind the leering violence and allied crudities, both a purpose and a director are clearly evident. Involving a whisky priest (Shaw), a sadistic bandit (Savalas), a puckish traitor to the Revolution (Craig), and a military catalyst (Landau), the complex plot hinges on illusion, arguing obliquely and hauntingly that there is no comfort in loyalty, friendship, heroism, or even in doing the right thing. Scripted by Richard Aubrey, it's a strange, disturbing film, despite being plain bloody awful for much of the time.