MovieChat Forums > Hannie Caulder Discussion > Robert Culp and christopher Lee were th...

Robert Culp and christopher Lee were the two best parts in this movie

posted 9 years ago by Jefbecco-1
5 replies | jump to latest

Very strange movie.Vicious brutal villains who ,after murdering and raping in the beginning, are played as comedic buffoons. Weird. Gives the movie an off-kilter feel. Robert Culp as Thomas Luther Price and Christopher Lee as the gunmaker Bailey are the two best things about this movie. The sequence where Price is teaching Hannie how to shoot is great. It's obvious that that the script was written by somebody who knew a thing or two about combat. Burt Kennedy ,who wrote and directed the movie, served with the U.S. Army 1st Cavalry Division in the South Pacific during World War II. He received the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart, Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

He still made an odd movie however.

[–] pjhook1972 9 years ago

The tone of this movie was just all over the place. It constantly flops back and forth between silly slapstick comedy and extreme violence including a brutally realistic rape scene. Are we supposed to hate the villains or laugh at them? Perhaps the filmmakers thought the violence and brutality would be too much for audiences to handle so the comedy was added later to make the film more appealing for mass consumption. This would have worked much better as a darkly disturbing rape/revenge thriller without all the unnecessary (and mostly unfunny given the context) attempts at humor.

Overall a mediocre film at best, raised up by a few great performances, but ultimately missing its mark and falling far short of its potential.

[–] Jefbecco-1 9 years ago

Yes it did. I ,for one, think it should have been a more straightforward revenge drama. Like "Rolling Thunder" (1977).

[–] thbryn 8 years ago

Culp and Lee were good (surprised CL got the part).

Kisskiss, Bangbang

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Though this was evidently made in 1971, I saw it as a first-run release in the summer of 1972...at a drive-in, most fittingly.

For all the critical talk of the 70's being a "Golden Age for movies"(The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, etc), there were actually a lot of movies like THIS. Rather cheapjack foreign productions with good but not A-list casts, not great, not bad...mediocre but interesting enough.

And the thing is, if you were a fan of all movies as I was, there was something memorable to take away from any movie of this type.

For me, it was definitely Robert Culp and Christopher Lee -- and particularly how they came together, with Lee's gunsmith character in a small adobe house with his family on the beach by the beautiful ocean.

For years after I saw Hannie Caulder, I would occasionally remember the "niftiness" of a Western taking place at the BEACH. At least for about 20 minutes. At this idyllic beach setting, Culp's interesting gunslinger with the interesting name(Thomas Luther Price) would give Raquel Welch's vengeance-seeking Hannie Caulder a good, tough, relentless drilling as a gunslinger, and Culp's old friend Lee would fashion Hannie a lightweight gun ...for a woman to use.

Eventually a gang of banditos show up at the beach house and Culp, Lee and Welch must kill them all in a gunbattle by the beach that "pays off" the location. I always wondered this: wouldn't the Lee character have to deal with marauding banditos like, every WEEK? All alone at the beach, and all.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

CONT

Robert Culp was a TV star in the main, he didn't have what it takes to hold on to movie stardom. Still, he WAS cast in a few major films in the late 60s and early 70's: Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice; Hickey and Boggs with his old I Spy partner, Bill Cosby and -- this -- where he impressed lot of us "nobodies" but also impressed Quentin Tarantino with his elegant, soulful and slightly sad bounty hunter. Tall, lanky, bearded(here) with John Lennon spectacles(here) -- and keeping his sometimes "overly arch" TV line readings under some control, Culp cut a fine Western figure here, half father-figure and half possible lover to Welch. And he gets killed surprisingly early in the film, lending the whole affair a kind of sad gravitas that makes Hannie's subsequent shootouts with the bad guys all the more satisfying.

As for Christopher Lee, here he was NOT playing a horror guy, NOT playing a bad guy, and lending his formidable height and presence to a sympathetic character well matched as a friend with the lanky Culp.

At the beach. Culp, Lee and the Beach. Far more memorable than Racquel Welch in her peekaboo poncho...