With eyes obviously much sharper than mine, some people maintain that 1972’s Cut-Throats Nine (Condenados a Vivir) is the inspiration for Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. It’s true both are westerns and the snowy setting of Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent’s original is unusual in the same way that The Hateful Eight’s was (though let’s not forget Sergio Corbucci’s great snow-filled western The Great Silence of 1968). And it’s also true that Tarantino loves to plunder overlooked genre movies of yore.
Which would make this spaghetti western – a paella western, more precisely, since it’s made in Spain – a prime candidate. But having watched it I cannot see much more connecting the two films than the snow, a certain colour palette, perhaps, and a grungey masculinity. Plus a number in the title.
In plot terms there’s not much either. A US sergeant, accompanied by his pretty daughter, is taking a wagonload of murderers, rapists, thieves and gimp-eyed bad men to Fort Green, where justice of a sort will be dealt. En route they are ambushed by a gang of thieves convinced the wagon is also transporting gold to the fort. When the wagon is destroyed in the ensuing melée, the sergeant, the desperadoes and the pretty young daughter are forced to band together and strike out over the snowy mountains on foot.
Jeopardy is all around in this movie – the robbers seem certain to return, the convicts are determined to overwhelm the sergeant and his single gun, plus the weather is inhospitably cold. On top of that we learn that one of the men – identity uncertain – was responsible for the killing of the sergeant’s wife.
Poor hygiene, bad language and brutal violence abound. Within moments of the film opening a man has pissed his pants. Minutes later another has been clubbed to the ground and yet another has had his throat slit. In fact after Cut-Throats Nine failed to set screens alight on its first release it limped around on the late-night horror circuit for a while, bolstered by the regular cutaways to blood and guts that were added later expressly to pull in the gorehounds. Not for nothing was the film later dubbed “possibly the most violent Eurowestern ever made”.
It’s not the most beautifully shot film in the world but the scenery (the Pyrenees) is majestic and the performances are tasty. Marchent made over 20 westerns and Robert Hundar turned up in a handful of them, usually as the star. He’s convincingly noble here as the sergeant on a mission to transport the men, avenge his wife and keep his daughter safe. Not much is demanded from Emma Cohen as the scared daughter Cathy (not sure why the IMDb is currently calling her Sarah, but Cathy is what everyone on screen calls her) but Cohen is a compelling addition to a cast that’s all-round better than you might expect – Antonio Iranzo also stands out as a snake-eyed killer, and Manuel Tejada as the handsomest of a bad bunch is nicely smooth as a man making eyes at the sergeant’s daughter.
There are many hard masculine stares in this movie and the picture it paints of the west is cold and dark. Marchent summons a paranoid atmosphere emphasised by a camera that always seems too close to the action. It gives the film an urgency that makes it feel much more modern than its 50-something years.
Marchent isn’t just churning it out, in other words. And though the villains can get a bit rent-a-baddie here and there – snarling, squinting, spitting – the compensations come from a plot that both conforms to and confounds genre expectations. There are surprises, though not really any shocks, unless you’ve not worked out who really killed Sgt Brown’s wife before the ta-daa arrives.
Cut-Throats Nine – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
