The Grand Duel (1972)
It is a spaghetti western with Lee van Cleef and a theme that can rival with some of the best from Morricone - which made Tarantino use it as well. All the parts for a good spaghetti western are there, but it doesn’t quite all come together.
The script is pretty good about a sheriff who is taking an accused murderer away from a group a bounty hunters, and an innocent group of passengers on a stagecoach gets caught in the middle of plenty of gunfights. Along the way we learn that there is much more to the backstory of this accused murderer.
The film is very violent, even for spaghetti standards, with a massacre of several families and it also lives up to its title with plenty of gunfight duels. But for all its grittiness, it sometimes tries to be funny and silly, which seems really weird and out of place.
While practically almost every spaghetti western borrows something from Leone, I found this one to do it a bit too much. The director Giancarlo Santi was an assistant director on some of Leones films, so he learned from the best but I was missing something that could have been his own style. All the elements comes of as mostly imitations and not interpretations.
Rating: 3.5