A Bullet for the General

A spaghetti Western on a par with Leone's. It shares Volonté and Kinski with For a Few Dollars More, and Luis Bacalov's haunting score was 'supervised' by Ennio Morricone, but the politics are more radical than anything Leone stood for (it ends with a ringing call to arms: 'Don't buy bread, buy dynamite!'). Lou Castel plays a tight-lipped gringo who insinuates himself into Volonté's gang of Mexican bandits on the fringes of the revolution. The film charts the peculiar friendship between these two blinkered mercenaries, and Volonté's belated arrival at a political consciousness. This intelligent, compelling reversal of the archetypal Hollywood schema (in which an American star lends his gun to the peasants' cause) was scripted by Franco Solinas, who also contributed to Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano, Costa-Gavras' State of Siege, Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers and Queimada!