Clay McCord (Alex Cord) is a man with problems - he's a very capable and rather good-natured outlaw, but so popular with the bounty hunters (who are all a bunch of amoral sadists) he can hardly find a place to rest for a second. He has been able to cope with a life on the run for quite some time now, yet he has also developed an ever increasing case of shaking fits that make his weapon hand very unreliable and - what's probably worse - bring traumatic memories of his epileptic father with them. Until now, Clay has been able to hide his weakness from those nice people around him, but his health has reached a point where this won't be possible for much longer. Of course, there's always the outlaw town of Escondido to hole up in. Trouble is, Escondido's sadistic town boss Krant (Mario Brega) and McCord aren't the best of friends, either and the doctor Clay put his hopes in is hanging from a noose.
How fortunate then that the governor of New Mexico has declared an amnesty for people like Clay. They only have to ride into the next town and deliver their guns. There's even fifty dollars in it for the amnesty-willing.
Alas, Clay's streak of bad luck continues, with "the next town" being a place called Tuscosa, full of good people who aren't much for giving others second chances. Tuscosa's sheriff Colby (Arthur Kennedy) does everything in his power to make sure nobody ever reaches his town alive to get his amnesty. He even goes so far as to set up a blockade around Escondido, that lets no-one in or out - women and little children dying of hunger be damned.
It looks very bad for Clay and the poor people of Escondido, until the the governor of New Mexico himself, Lem Carter (Robert Ryan, allowed some scenes of ridiculous but great bad-assitude), comes to town to ensure that his amnesty law does what it is supposed to do. He also takes a real and helpful interest in Clay.
Franco Giraldi's A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die is a rather strange film. It stands with one foot in the territory of the classic and morally clear-cut American western, while the other is planted firmly in the greyish mud of the Spaghetti Western.
This lends the film something of a schizophrenic mood of having two incompatible ways to look at the world at once - not in the productive way that would bring the two Western styles into some kind of dialogue, but rather by jumping from one tone to the next, sometimes in a single scene. Ryan's character is very much the traditional, honest and honorable cowboy character he seldom played in American films, while Cord and Kennedy are typical products of the Italian tradition.
I found it difficult to get a real grip on the film - I wouldn't dare to speculate about the position it tries to take in the Western genre; to be honest, I'm not even sure if its ending is supposed to be a happy end or not. Which would be less of a problem if I thought Giraldi was out to shake the viewer up. Instead I'm afraid he just wasn't all that sure himself.
This doesn't mean A Minute to Pray... isn't worth watching. If you are just going with the flow, you will find some rough but effective filmmaking, some of the muddiest towns in any Western and mostly solid acting. Cord is a little problematic when he tries to be the calculating gunman most of his peers fear, yet very convincing when he's crying, whining, having fits or being tortured, and since he's doing much more of the latter, his performance works out fine.
He's just fortunate he doesn't have to share many scenes with Robert Ryan, who is not doing much acting-wise, and is still making every scene he's in his own.
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2 comments:
I agree with you on this one. I had heard good things about it, so I was disappointed upon seeing it, but I still got a lot of enjoyment, as always, out of Robert Ryan. His appearance lead me to wonder, was there any American star who was able to resist the lure of spaghetti westerns?
I offer John Wayne, who was too busy winning the Vietnam War on screen & James Stewart who had already helped the birth of the American revisionist Western through his work with Anthony Mann. I think.
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