Hannie Caulder (1972)

One of the top ten Westerns of all time. Otherworldly acting by Raquel Welch. Is Racquel Welch Hannie Caulder? Or is Hannie Caulder Raquel Welch? Great supporting cast: Robert Culp, Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin, Jack Elam, Stephen Boyd, and Christopher Lee. One of those rare movies like Casablanca or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that you can watch once a year, and every time it is like watching it the first time.

After she is raped and her husband murdered, a woman (Raquel Welch) hires a bounty hunter to instruct her in the use of a gun so she can get her revenge on the three outlaws (Ernest Borgnine and two guys) responsible.Quentin Tarantino said the film was one of his inspirations for Kill Bill. "Why I love Hannie Caulder so much is Robert Culp. He is so magnificent in that movie. I actually think there's a bit of similarity between Sonny Chiba and Uma (in Kill Bill) and Raquel Welch and Robert Culp in Hannie Caulder." You can totally see it during the training montage, which smacks of kung fu movies more than westerns.And Christopher Lee is in this? How many westerns has he done? None other that I can think of. But what do I know? It is still great seeing him here.

British Westerns were a very rare commodity indeed and few, if any, were ever box-office draws; so it was curious – to say the least – for Tigon, a company usually deemed a third-rate Hammer Horror wannabe, to want to branch out by tackling such an offbeat genre. Shrewdly, however, they did not presume to know as much about the form as the Americans; therefore, they opted to rope in much Hollywood talent for the task (abetted by few choice homegrown names).The result is interesting for a number of reasons, yet the low budget involved is betrayed by the overall unassuming nature of the piece and its rather trim duration (85 minutes). That said, the film is fashionably bloody and amoral (its trio of caricature villains – unconventionally played in broadly comic terms by Western stalwarts Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam and Strother Martin shoot, pillage and rape their way through the proceedings with abandon and evident glee). Similarly, a scantily-clad Raquel Welch (though an American, she first came to prominence in Britain with Hammer's ONE MILLION, B.C. {1966}) in the title role could do no wrong. The rest of the cast is made up of: Robert Culp as a conscientious bounty hunter (he always gives back a fraction of the reward money to pay for the victims' funeral expenses!) who befriends the heroine and molds her – against his better judgment – into an avenging angel; a dignified Christopher Lee as a gunsmith with a Mexican wife and a brood of kids in tow (always relishing non-horror parts, this proved his only foray into the Western); Diana Dors barely registering as a brothel madam; and, uncredited, Stephen Boyd intriguingly shrouded in mystery (the finale would suggest that a sequel may have been intended where he would have taken over from Culp as Caulder's mentor, but perhaps the film was not the expected runaway success and the idea was scrapped).Director Kennedy, another genre staple, handles the narrative with customary competence – displaying an eye for wide open spaces (aided in no small measure by a stirring Ken Thorne score) but also a few welcome stylistic flourishes (notably the violation of Welch's character in which the lusty brothers seem to blend into one another as they take turns assaulting her and Borgnine's slo-mo knife throw at Culp's expense).

For a long time in mainstream movies the only way a female protagonist could take justice into her own hands was if she was raped. Why this trope exists as much as it does I don't know; however, because time after time in these sorts of films it was the key to justify female vigilantism, the act devolved, from something to be taken seriously, to merely as a plot-point, violence for the heroine to face, get over, and more often than not, never talk about again in the context of the story. Hannie Caulder is no exception and for a comedy-western it's a horrible direction to go in. Indeed, director Burt Kennedy, famous for Support your Local Sheriff, seems like he just can't help himself. If this is suppose to be a gritty tale of female redemption why in the world are the Three Stooges in it? Unwashed, raping, murdering Stooges, but comedians nonetheless. Every time Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin and Jack Elam appear, even in an opening bank- robbery gone bad that comes off more like a Sam Peckinpah parody, their squabbling feels as if the only thing missing is a "nyuk nyuk nyuk."Also, while I understand Raquel Welch is an incredibly beautiful woman, willing to wear next to nothing for a good third of the movie -- but that poncho that she has on in all the publicity shots? It's the same blanket that she was raped in; the only thing she was able to salvage from her burning house. I can understand in context of the story having her wear it for a while, but then Kennedy turns around and decides to feature it on the cover is a little bit jaw- dropping. But I suppose that was just the zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 70s, a time when "Sexy Rape Victim" wasn't a contradiction in words to the men making movies.