Like so many of the Hollywood female legends of bygone days Rita Hayworth was having trouble finding work. But it was more than changing taste and newer and younger stars coming along. Hayworth was showing signs of the dementia that sadly plagued her last exile years from the silver screen.The Bastard was one of many bad films she made toward the end of her career. She plays the mother of a pair of criminal sons Giuliano Gemma and Klaus Kinski. One's just bad, but Kinski is plain psychotic. Kinski thinks Gemma betrayed him, Kinski has him worked over and then rapes and runs off with Gemma's girlfriend.All this while poor drunken Rita weeps and just says she wants one big happy family again.We learn here that Joan Crawford turned this one down. Smart career move.

I am not a great spaghetti crime flicks fan. Not at all. But this one is worth in some points. I think it's an acceptable time waster, where we can watch one more time the lost Rita Hayworth, already "dead" as an actress, a real one, I mean. Don't forget that she had the terrific Alzheimer disease - lost of memory - and that she forgot almost all her script lines. The sequence where she talks to Giuliano Gemma in the drawing room, and holds a bottle of whisky, as she wanted to read the bottle label...I guess she actually read her script lines. She had the very same problem on the set of other films, such as WRATH OF GOLD. When I knew that, I must admit that I was devastated. So sad. It really made me sick. So, back to this feature, I spent a good time watching it. A robbery right in the middle of the movie, a sequence with no real connection with the rest of the story, a scheme I have seen in some other films.But the real mystery, is why the hell an earthquake has to do in such a movie?As if we saw John Mac Lane in a DIE HARD flick dying in falling from a chair...Yes a strange movie indeed.

Is this film a guilty pleasure? A departure from 60's predictable Hollywood style, there was something strange and hard to place about this film until its Italian roots became apparent. Life on the run is so good for badboy Jason in the earlier part of the film that you know something is going to go terribly wrong. The devastating diva female characters are stunning - a Madonna, whore, and mother (alcoholic middle-aged ex-model) triangle of 60's tigresses between which the attractive but somewhat one-dimensional male lead is trapped. Jason is a mere male, and the opportunity of new love from an angelic saviour is passed in for his compulsory trajectory of revenge. Martha, the mother, is drunk half the time and steal the scenes with her unpredictable manic mood swings around her twisted pride in her criminal sons. The fast cars, luxury homes, nightclub scene of go-go-dancing, the country and western idylls and American dream scenery provide a colourful backdrop and make a trip back to 1968 all the sweeter.

It's a bit difficult for me to give a final verdict on this movie since, despite the running time given by IMDb, I saw it by way of a crummy bootleg of an Asian TV broadcast that had been chopped down to about 67 minutes. Still, what remained was entertaining enough to keep me watching (and wondering what had been left out).The Bastard is about a thief who's betrayed by his brother, crime boss Klaus Kinski, and has the tendons in his right hand cut. After that the movie is about the thief licking his wounds, enjoying some sexual healing, learning to shoot with his left hand, and planning his revenge. Then, in an odd and way-out-of-left-field plot device, a natural disaster intercedes and makes the ending feel like a cop-out.It would be nice if somebody brought out a restored version so people could rediscover this one.