The Big Gundown (1967)

The Big Gundown (Italian title: La resa dei conti, roughly The Settling of Scores) is a 1966 Spaghetti Western film, co-written by long-time Sergio Leone collaborator Sergio Donati, directed by Sergio Sollima, and starring Lee Van Cleef and Tomas Milian. It was originally released by Columbia Pictures in the US as a double feature with A Time for Killing.

The film falls under the subgenre called Zapata Westerns, which are spaghetti westerns with some political context usually concerning the Mexican revolution. Some critics, such as Leonard Maltin, consider the film one of the finest spaghetti westerns, second only to Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy. It was the first film Van Cleef made following The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and was his first leading man or hero role. Tomas Milian played Cuchillo, a charming rogue accused of rape and murder. Run, Man, Run! (1968) was a sequel which brought back Milian without Van Cleef.

It was important to Sergio Sollima that he tell a classic tale of a rich corrupt politician vs. a poor misunderstood peasant/scapegoat as a way of addressing the age old subject that, being Italian, he knew quite well living under the dictatorship of Mussolini during World War II. This film would actually share more with Leone's opus Once Upon a Time in the West than the Eastwood pictures. Each focuses on the modernizing of the West and the corrupt, rich businessmen that manipulated and used the poor.
The film was shot in Almería, Spain, where many famous Italian Westerns were filmed.

Synopsis

Possessing a reputation for bringing criminals to justice, ready-to-retire bounty hunter Jonathan Corbett (Lee Van Cleef) is summoned to a party by a Texas railroad tycoon by the name of Brockston (Walter Barnes), whose daughter is getting married. Brockston plants the seed that Corbett should consider a run for the Senate, but not before doing one last bounty hunt.

Actors