"Hannie Caulder" starts with Emmett(Ernerst Borgnine), Frank(Jack Elam) and Rufus Clemens(Strother Martin) going on a rampage that originates with a bloody bank robbery. They escape and kill a stationmaster before gang raping his wife Hannie(Raquel Welch), leaving her for dead. She pulls herself from the wreckage and
makes it to a well where she encounters Thomas Luther Price(Robert Culp), a not unfriendly bounty hunter. They tangle and she asks him to train her to exact revenge. At first, he refuses and damn if she is not persistent, but he eventually acquiesces, telling her they have to see a man(Christopher Lee) about a gun in Mexico.
I think the one thing that killed off westerns more than anything else was that the old stars were getting too old and there was nobody to really replace them.(Well, there's Clint Eastwood but he always had bigger ambitions...) So, it might seem weird at first to let Raquel Welch of all people star in one in "Hannie Caulder" but surprisingly she succeeds in the end, playing a character who is undergoing changes and learning throughout the movie, according to need.(By contrast, Robert Culp seems naturally suited to the terrain.) As Thomas says, Hannie wants to be a man and how else to survive in a lawless and brutal west where the army sleeps on the job, the sheriff looks the other way and the only justice comes from the end of a bounty hunter's gun?
August 17, 2011
