Oh man, perhaps you haven't seen enough westerns? Even without counting all the banal series westerns that occupied the endless air-conditioned Saturday afternoons of my childhood, Hollywood and Cinecitta have put out enough B-westerns over the past 75 years to splice a celluloid ribbon from here to the moon.
I'll grant you, Trackers is no John Ford classic, but the film has enough redeeming value to rate a 6 on my personal scale.
I rate this film on par with Burt Lancaster's Valdez is Coming.
Like Burt, Richard Harris is always entertaining. The opening bit about trapping bank robbers was inspired. I loved the buckets along the town's street stamped "For Fire Only" that held, not water to douse a fire, but oil dumped at the end of town to create a blazing barrier. Clever bit of business, that. But, I admit that the script deteriorates into one episode after another of someone (usually Harris) being beaten into a bloody pulp, in this stalwart quest for vengeance.
I don't know if you recall a Harris film that made big money around the time of this film -- A Man Called Horse? Richard took quite a beating in that film. He was hung over an open fire from eagle claws plunged into his pectorals. Audiences of the time loved it. My mother saw it twice.
We're talking of a Hollywood post Bonny and Clyde and Wild Bunch when every producer and his Italian brother was trying to out-do the bloodiness of the last hit film. Perhaps Trackers is yet another formulaic followup along this vein <sic>, before some shark-skinned exec got the idea for Return of a Man Called Horse which bombed at the box office, but had a great second-life on late night TV.
Or perhaps it's merely the appearance of Al Lettieri that lends this film its B-movie ennui? ;#)
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