CITTA VIOLENTA

Antonio Margheriti was clearly trying something new here: a brutal and overblown Gothic Western that would be, in his own words, “more Sicilian than American.” He already had form with the Gothic, having produced a brilliant Italian horror in the early tradition of Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava (Castle of Blood); Westerns, less so: Vengeance, his first go, was a dull sketch, quickly forgotten. But …Cain is different -- as in, “special”; almost malformed.

At times, it hardly hangs together at all. A “tornado” rips through the (ghost) town, banging a few windows shut and blowing bits of hay around; and yet the weather is wild and murky, emitting tangible menace. Stock sets collapse and random tints confuse night and day, but this merely adds to the uncanny clammer, the surreal malevolence.

The film is gritty and primal, partly because there wasn’t much money, but also because the savage natural imagery (rattlesnakes and screaming birds and swirling dust) offsets the lavish Gothic kitsch of Acombar’s family melodrama. This unsettling, unbalanced triumph is Bava-esque -- the chiming bell, ringing through the eye of the storm, as maddening and ominous as The Dripping Tap.

Misfits, cripples, petty criminals and murderers are co-opted by a germinal crime dynasty: then, in both Gothic and Sicilian tradition, these core bonds are attacked with the full force of supernatural or cosmic vengeance. “A ghost returns,” intones Maria, the tramp who cheated Klaus Kinski’s avenging apparition, Gary Hamilton, “and he’ll have only one desire in his heart…REVENGE.”

This is the third of Kinski’s great Western roles, after Tigrero’s fey, clinical chill (The Great Silence) and the ribald mania of El Santo (A Bullet for the General). Gary Hamilton’s history is all ruin and betrayal -- extreme trauma that strips human layers away. So reduced, the character is absurd and one-dimensional, but internal power can be glimpsed through Kinski’s hard blue eyes, in which tears turn to silver darts that flash through the dark.


And God Said to Cain… (Antonio Margheriti, 1970)