How much you'll enjoy Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die! (Such a good title that it was actually previously a title for a whole *other* 2nd tier Spaghetti Western and I had to double check the box to make sure I had the right one) will depend really on how much you enjoy this motley cast of faces and how they can pose and sneer menacingly (or, alternately, quite cooly).
It's not really a movie you watch for any sort of original story- a man dead set on revenge because some Bad Dude raped and killed his love in front of him and then framed him for a crime he didn't commit, thats just another Tuesday on an Italian movie set- and anything you may want to find from Dario Argento as some kind of marker of the operative isn't really there (at least not yet, but then this was his first produced script so I cut him some slack here).
Unfortunately, the gun play is also just average, nothing too poor but nothing that makes you sit up and become transfixed or in a state of arm-rest-pulling tension (the highlight for me is when O'Bannion basically Hulks out of a chair to punch and main and fight back against these companeros who have him and our stubble-man anti hero tied up), and the music is fairly rote as well.
I was enjoying enough of the near Silent-film star rugged and ugly on-screen magnetism of the B cast (Preston as an example) enough to get me through the movie, like the less they said the more compelling they are, some of the violence and a handful of one-liners have a Nihilistic gallows humor, and to be sure Nakadai is the highlight for every moment his slithering, death-eyed villain madman taunts and maims and he is kind of a walking contradiction of a man subtly chewing the scenery and actors around him, if that makes sense (or uh he's a more classy vicious psychopathic killer than like a Volante or Van Cleef).
Totally acceptable after a long day in the proverbial Mines, and mostly for Argento or Spaghetti Western completitsts. I wish I had a strong triple whiskey to go with it.
It's not really a movie you watch for any sort of original story- a man dead set on revenge because some Bad Dude raped and killed his love in front of him and then framed him for a crime he didn't commit, thats just another Tuesday on an Italian movie set- and anything you may want to find from Dario Argento as some kind of marker of the operative isn't really there (at least not yet, but then this was his first produced script so I cut him some slack here).
Unfortunately, the gun play is also just average, nothing too poor but nothing that makes you sit up and become transfixed or in a state of arm-rest-pulling tension (the highlight for me is when O'Bannion basically Hulks out of a chair to punch and main and fight back against these companeros who have him and our stubble-man anti hero tied up), and the music is fairly rote as well.
I was enjoying enough of the near Silent-film star rugged and ugly on-screen magnetism of the B cast (Preston as an example) enough to get me through the movie, like the less they said the more compelling they are, some of the violence and a handful of one-liners have a Nihilistic gallows humor, and to be sure Nakadai is the highlight for every moment his slithering, death-eyed villain madman taunts and maims and he is kind of a walking contradiction of a man subtly chewing the scenery and actors around him, if that makes sense (or uh he's a more classy vicious psychopathic killer than like a Volante or Van Cleef).
Totally acceptable after a long day in the proverbial Mines, and mostly for Argento or Spaghetti Western completitsts. I wish I had a strong triple whiskey to go with it.