"Sugar Colt" director Franco Giraldi's splendid Spaghetti western "A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die" is grim and cynical, featuring a trio of Americans: Alex Cord, Arthur Kennedy, and Robert Ryan. Composer Carlo Rustichelli contributes an atmospheric score, and "Keoma" lenser Aiace Parolin makes everything look Euro-western cool. All the shots are perfectly composed with regard to the players on camera and the arena of action. Louis Garfinkle, who later provided the story for the Oscar-winning Vietnam epic "The Deer Hunter," Ugo Liberatore of "The Tramplers," and Albert Band of "The Hellbenders" have written an exciting and insightful sagebrusher about an outlaw, Clay McCord (Alex Cord), on the dodge. Bounty hunters flock after McCord and his partner Fred Duskin (Giampiero Albertini of "Commandos") and arrive ahead of them at a mission. McCord knows Father Santana, and he is bringing him a bottle of whiskey. Two bounty hunters, Jesús María (Aldo Sambrell of "Navajo Joe") and Sein (Antonio Molino Rojo of "A Bullet for Sandoval"), kill the monk in cold blood. These villains are so despicable that they remove the body from the head and stuff it into a bag rather than drag an entire corpse around with them. Afterward, they try to ambush them. Sein masquerades as a priest, but Clay is too quick for them. He guns down Sein, and Fred takes care of Jesús. The fly in the ointment is that Clay suffers from tremors in the right arm, like the John Wayne character Cole Thornton in Howard Hawks' "El Dorado." Clay takes refuge in the border town of Escondido. Incidentally, Escondido is run an imposing hombre named Krant (Mario Brega of "A Fistful of Dollars"), and he has no sympathy for McCord. The scene where Clay is walking with a bottle in his hand that casts the reflection of a desperado posed to shoot him in the back with a rifle is neat! The story is peppered with flashbacks, and we learn how Clay turned into a swift-shooting, crack-shot of a gunslinger. Clay's poor ailing father is ridiculed and dragged unceremoniously through the streets while suffering an epileptic seizure. Clay snatches a six-gun and blasts away at the bastards.
Review of A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die
