"Seven Magnificent Guns" director Romolo Guerrieri helmed this above-average but uneven spaghetti western with Mark Damon, Rosalba Neri, and Lawrence Dobkin,after he made the aforementioned epic. "Johnny Yuma" wa released in the mid-1960s when Italian westerns were just hitting their stride. Indeed, "Johnny Yuma" illuminated screens before Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" reached cinemas. This gritty, sun-drenched, shoot'em up set in the arid Southwest imitates traditional American oaters as well as revisionist Spaghetti westers. Like a 1950s' Hollywood western, Guerrieri's sagebrusher boasts a title credits ballad. Mark Damon makes a serviceable hero, but he isn't cast in the steely mold of the monosyllabic bounty hunter. He is more of a 1950's American western hero. Moreover, he makes a point of it after he guns down three hombres and refuses to collect the bounty on them. Meanwhile, "Johnny Yuma" delivers a double-digit. Spaghetti western body count and conjures up a reasonable amount of suspense in its simple, largely dramatic, often brutal saga. The gang of trigger-happy ruffians led by a scheming wife resolve to eliminate the heir to a fortune. Guerrieri and co-scenarist Fernando Di Leo of "A Fistful of Dollars," along with Sauro Scavolini and Giovanni Simonelli of "Any Gun Can Play," have contrived a largely predictable western about betrayal, murder, and revenge. The surprises aren't plentiful, but this violent opus doesn't dawdle. The gorgeous scenery around Almeria, Spain, where "Johnny Yuma" was lensed by "Gunmen of the Rio Grande" cinematographer Mario Capriotti, serves a metaphor for life and death. Capriotti makes you feel the heat, the sweat, and the flies. Guerrieri and Capriotti like to indulge themselves with pans that rotate 360 degrees, whether they are surveying the rugged scenery or a players in a poker game. Despite its reliance on dramatic gimmicks, Guerrieri and his writers occasionally allow reality to intrude into the plot. Principally, they stress that the west of "Johnny Yuma" is a place where you can suffer death just as fatally from a gun barrel as from lack of water.The eponymous hero of "Johnny Yuma" is an accurate, young, swift-on-the-draw gunslinger who blasted his way to fame in Yuma with his six-gun. Johnny's uncle, wealthy land owner Thomas Felton (Leslie Daniels of "Paisan"), has decided to leave everything that he owns to the pistol-packing protagonist, Johnny Yuma, because the latter is more suited to running a ranch than anybody on his wife's side of the family. We are told that Felton and his wife didn't have children. Of course, Felton's beautiful but treacherous wife Samantha (Rosalba Neri of "Lady Frankenstein") has tried without success to convince her cigar-smoking, wheel-chair bound husband to entrust everything to Pedro (Luigi Vannucchito of "The Red Tent"), her low-down brother. As it turns out, Pedro shows up to shoot Felton in cold blood at point blank range while Felton is practicing his marksmanship with black powder arms. The wife dispatches a Mexican servant, Luis 'Sancho' Fernandez, to take a letter to an ex-lover, Linus Jerome Carradine (Lawrence Dobkin of "Patton"), to kill the servant. The villains have done a shrewd job of implicating poor Sancho in the death of Felton. The remainder of the action is spent showing our hero dodge endless bullets while dropping his adversaries dead in their tracks without more than a single shot. Our hero's avowed enemy, Carradine, changes side, and they are virtually indestructible together in a gunfight. During an early saloon brawl scene, Carradine and Yuma meet and swap out gun belts. Yuma carries his Colt's revolver on his left hip, while Carradine wears his on his right hip. Carradine has a gun belt that allows him to detach the holster without having to wait for his six-gun to clear the leather. When Johnny shows up in San Marco, everybody initially mistakes him for Carradine since he has Carradine's gun belt with the initials LJC cinched around his waist.Although "Johnny Yuma" is driven by tragic events, Guerrieri makes time for humor that seems out of place. For example, Rosalba's strip-tease for the parrot scene looks straight out of a saucy Italian sex comedy. More often than not, the action is pretty heavy-handed rather than light-footed. Poor Mexican farmers bit the dust just to show how vile the villains are, and one of these hellions kills a innocent little boy. Indeed, the villains in "Johnny Yuma" emerge as incredible dastards. In one scene, these unsavory thugs rough up our hero, giving him a real beating along the lines of "A Fistful of Dollars," but they don't beat Johnny so horribly that he can only crawl afterward. Eventually, our youthful hero Johnny teams up with an older, wiser hombre,Carradine in a standard-issue Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid relationship where an older man trains a younger man. They have done everything to make Carradine look like Lee Van Cleef's Mortimer from "For A Few Dollars More," right down to his suitcase that accommodates his six-gun. Questionable comic relief is provided by a goofy Mexican peasant who constitutes an outrageous stereotype. "Vengeance is Mine" composer Nora Orlandi provides a charismatic orchestral soundtrack that enhances the mood of this melodrama.

This is a very decent, if somewhat obscure, spaghetti Western. It lacks a famous-name director like Sergio Leone or American male stars like Clint Eastwood or Henry Fonda, or even Cameron Mitchell (the lead is the journeyman European actor Mark Damon), but it has one principal strength--Rosalba Neri as the sexually voracious villainess. Neri today tends to be labeled as a "scream queen", casting her into category with a lot of more modern-day American bimbos with little talent beyond taking off their clothes. Neri, however, was a very good actress, even if she was usually dubbed into English. She had a ten or fifteen year career under her belt before she started regularly stripping off in the last few years before she retired in the early 70's (and even though she was in thirties by then and didn't have the benefit of modern-day plastic surgery, she managed to outshine the present-day "scream queens" even in that department).More importantly though, she was actually in good movies now and then--and this is one of them. Neri plays the young widow of a wealthy man (whose murder she herself no doubt arranged). She finds out that her late husband left his fortune to his gunfighter nephew, Johnny Yuma (Mark Damon), so she beguiles her various lovers and her sleazy brother into trying to murder him. The plot gets a little confusing at times, but you never lose interest when Neri is on the screen. She is deliciously evil and quite sexy, even though she only strips for her parrot(!) and not the viewer in this early role. Check it out if you like spaghetti and saucy Italian actresses.

One of the more satisfying Western all'italiana, Johnny Yuma has the freshness of many WAI made during the heyday of the genre and is highly recommended for fans of the genre or offbeat, intelligent cinema.Johnny Yuma is, in most respects, not terribly original, but this actually does not count against it. The success of a genre film depends on how well it meets the audience's expectations as well as provides surprising variations on these expected elements. Earlier, pleasing experiences are recreated but with subtle (or major) twist that provide continuing interest. The quality of the execution is also, obviously, important. A tired retread will be less successful than a sincere attempt to entertain or move the audience.Given these criteria, Johnny Yuma succeeds. There are numerous reprises of elements from earlier films. The setting is the brutal, twisted semi-feudal twilight world of shared by many of the best "Gothic family" westerns made 1964-1968 such as Tempo di massacre (1966). The plot is a combination of the basic Fistful of Dollars (1964) plot and the Ringo films, a fact not surprising as screenwriter Fendiando di Leo was involved in both. Di Leo was one of the best screenwriters in the popular cinema coming out of Cinecitta in the 1960s-70s and his work helped provide much of the thematic continuities and coherency to the genre (Along with a couple of other personalities in a few distinct circles of actors, directors, and screenwriters). In the FOD plot, the protagonist arrives in town, stirs up a tense situation, then undergoes a near-death followed by a resurrection (in some films, like Quella sporca storia nel west (1968) it is quite literally a crucifixion). The Catholic undertone to the narrative and the symbolism is intriguing, especially given the implicit populist/explicit socialist leanings of the filmmakers and their films. The Ringo plot, developed more fully by screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi in a series of films starring Guliano Gemma, a egoistic protagonist chooses the interest of a community over his own through the medium of a relationship with a member of that community (with a healthy dash ironic uncertainty).The relationship between Carradine and Johnny is clearly based on that of Manco/Mortimer from a Fistful of Dollar (1965). The two scene of the exchange of the gun belts provides a clever dialog and understanding between the two. Numerous films, including Da uomo a uomo (1968) or even El Chuncho, quién sabe? (1967), use this relationship between an older and younger man (father/son, older/younger brother, Anglo adviser/adversary and peasant revolutionary) as a central dynamic to the plot.Additionally, there is the focus on deception and misdirection, mazes and mirrors, that recur throughout the best early WAI. The canons and pueblos of Almeria become literal mazes through which protagonist and antagonist play shifting games of cat and mouse.What distinguishes Johnny Yuma from other WAI is the quality of director Romolo Guerriri's use of visual/psychological space together arrangement with the script's intelligent mechanisms to forward the plot. Dialogue was never very important to the WAI and often absurdly unintelligible (thought there are exceptions, such as the cynical commentaries in Django (1966) or Faccia a faccia (1967).Psychological depth of character is created almost entirely through iconic imagery, it's juxtapositions, and it's description of the overall narrative situation. See how the presence of the deadly Samantha is felt during the beating scene – watching from the roof or from the background of the action. Or how Johnny strips Samantha and Pedro of their security and confidence in their power through his stealthy invasions of their ranch, hotel, even bedroom (this, again, is a theme from FOD). Finally, note how there is a focus on the search for information. Like many elements, this is borrowed from FOD which was ultimately based on the hard-boiled mystery novel Red Harvest. It is through incidental contacts, wanted posters, overheard conversations, glances out of windows, watches left in the dust, or mistaken identities and movements through the ripples created by the actions of Pedro and Samantha within this surreal and absurd reality that the narrative tacks forward to it's conclusion.The movie was notable in it's time for what were perceived of as excesses in violence. Of course, these films were hardly more violent than many American westerns. What was different was the psychological intensity of the violence and the causes to which it was attributed, which is to say that it was not the violence but it's meaning that had changed. Johnny Yuma is distinct and interesting in it's use and portrayal of violence and this is another interesting aspect of the film.What I personally find most interesting about most of this genre is the link it provides to the anonymous, nameless audiences in Italy and Spain to whom these recurrent narratives held some significance and interest. The artifact may have no intrinsic worth in and of itself – some flint debitage from a prehistoric site, a shard of cruse pottery, or a moldering piece of leather and rusted metal – but it is reference to some nameless presence, lives, that were significant simply because they existed. While Johnny Yuma has intrinsic worth, much of it's interest for me derives from this connection and mystery.Top spaghetti western list http://imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=21849907Average SWs http://imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=21849889For fanatics only (bottom of the barrel) http://imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=21849890

This wonderful little film has all of the elements that made the Spaghetti Western so exciting and fun: GREAT music (by one of the few..if not the only..female composer to work in the genre, Nora Orlandi), EXCITING action sequences (and very vicious ones for the day!), and BEAUTIFUL scenery and sets (all in Almeria, Spain, of course). It also has a very good story with a nice tragic romance edge to it. The actors do marvelous jobs--with truly standout performances from Lawrence Dobkin and Rosalba Neri (in the most vital role for a female in a Spaghetti Western..outside of Cardinale in Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West"). Without posting any spoilers, let me just say that this movie contains one of the best endings of any film I have EVER seen!