{"id":3175,"date":"2012-07-27T13:22:23","date_gmt":"2012-07-27T13:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3175"},"modified":"2012-07-27T13:23:06","modified_gmt":"2012-07-27T13:23:06","slug":"more-dollars-for-the-macgregors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/reviews\/more-dollars-for-the-macgregors\/","title":{"rendered":"More Dollars for the MacGregors – Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"More<\/a>
More dollars for the MacGregors is<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Aka Ancora dollari per i MacGregor, La muerte busca un hombre
\n1970
\nOriginal running time: 98 mins
\nSpain \/ Italy
\nA Prodimex Films (Rome), Hispamer Films (Madrid) production
\nDirector: Jos\u00e9 Luis Merino
\nStory and screenplay: Jos\u00e9 Luis Merino, Enrico Colombo
\nCinematography: Emanuele Di Cola
\nEditor: Jos\u00e9 Antonio Rojo
\nCast: Peter Lee Lawrence (Robert McGregor \/ Blondie), Carlos Quiney (George Forsyte), Malisa Longo (Yuma), Stelvio Rosi (Ross Steward), Mariano Vidal Molina (Joe Saxon), Mar\u00eda Salerno (Maticha), Mar\u00eda Mahor (Gladys McGregor), Luis Mar\u00edn (Pancho), Antonio Mayans (Sturgess, Young Man after Saxon), Dan van Husen (Frank Landon), Antonio Jim\u00e9nez Escribano (Old Tradesman), Jos\u00e9 Jaspe (Sheriff of Jonesville), Jos\u00e9 Marco (Debuty sheriff), Stefano Caprioti, Enrique \u00c1vila, Giancarlo Fantini, Enzo Fisichella, Renato Paracchi, Santiago Rivero, Claudio Trionfi<\/p>\n

Despite the cheeky title, this wasn’t really an attempt to rip off Franco Giraldi’s box office smashes Seven Guns for the MacGregors<\/strong> (66) and Up the MacGregors<\/strong> (67).\u00a0 Whereas they were light-hearted romps this is a moody, cynical western with an almost total absence of humour and a rather dark, sombre atmosphere.\u00a0 It actually belongs more to the dual protagonist school of Spaghetti Westerns, in which two very different characters form an uneasy alliance in order to defeat a particularly dastardly varmint; most particularly For a Few Dollars More<\/strong>, which also revolved around a partnership between a blond, handsome bounty hunter and his older rival (and which also featured a sub plot involving a dead sibling).<\/p>\n

George Forsyte (Carlos Quiney) is a notorious bounty killer who is doing his best to earn a grand total of half a million dollars before retiring.\u00a0 He specialises in setting traps for his victims, drawing them in by using his wife Gladys (Mar\u00eda Mahor) as bait, pretending that she’s an innocent on the road carrying plenty of easily purloinable cash; and when he catches them, he shows no mercy, killing them with his trademark technique of a bullet in the forehead.\u00a0 Things go badly wrong, however, when he tries to bring in vicious killer Joe Saxon (Vidal Molina).\u00a0 Distracted momentarily by a poisonous snake, he allows Saxon to escape and Gladys is murdered as a result.\u00a0 Naturally enough, he wants to have revenge, but this doesn’t work out either: before he can get to him Saxon is killed \u2013 and the reward on his head is collected \u2013 by another bounty hunter called Robert MacGregor (Peter Lee Lawrence).<\/p>\n

While Forsyte spends time licking his wounds, MacGregor sets off to capture another villain, Ross Steward (Stan Cooper).\u00a0 Steward and his men are hiding out in the hills, where they’re forcing the local Indians to mine salt, but MacGregor’s initial efforts to locate him result in him being badly beaten and left for dead.\u00a0 Nursed back to health by tasty squaw Yuma (Malisa Longo), he finds his work has become further complicated by the reappearance of Forsyte, whose motivations have become even less clear following his wife’s death.<\/p>\n

More dollars for the MacGregors <\/strong>is a flawed but surprisingly enjoyable Spaghetti Western.\u00a0 As with many of the primarily Spanish westerns, it’s a surprisingly cruel affair, but it has higher production values and is put together with more skill than genre films made by the likes of Ignacio Iquino or Juan Bosch.\u00a0 The script has some good ideas, not least the character of Forsyte, a seriously ambiguous figure who becomes increasingly deranged as the running time progresses.<\/p>\n

In fact, for the first forty minutes or so it all works very well, but then it shifts focus with the death of Joe Saxon at about the forty minute mark.\u00a0 At this point Forsyte fades rather into the background \u2013 until the final stages of the film at least \u2013 and the less defined Macgregor, who had hardly featured previously, takes centre stage.\u00a0 Several new characters are also introduced, including the erratic Steward and the Indians (who look like nothing so much as escapees from a hippie festival), which acts to defuse the mood and ambience which had developed so nicely. In effect it plays like two parts of a TV series joined together into a feature length production, which raises the question as to whether this was intentional or whether one of the stars was perhaps unavailable for some of the filming and the script had to be adapted at the last moment.<\/p>\n

\"Peter<\/a>
Peter Lee Lawrence in More dollars for the MacGregors is<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Despite this, it’s reasonably made and although the budget wasn’t huge the production values are more than adequate.\u00a0 Jose Luis Merino was a competent director who worked in a variety of genres, and he definitely stands as one of the more capable directors working in Spanish popular cinema at the time.\u00a0 He’s greatly aided by some decent work from his regular cinematographer Emmanuele Di Cola and editor Jos\u00e9 Antonio Rojo (who all worked on and off together almost a dozen times), and the whole production has a curious, counter-cultural, mystical feel which is something of a surprise given that Merino’s other work was rather standard B-movie stuff.<\/p>\n

As for the performances, Peter Lee Lawrence makes for a solid lead despite the flimsiness of his character and Carlos Quiney, who appeared almost exclusively in films for Merino and was known as ‘the Spanish Errol Flynn’, is good as the ambiguous Forsyte.\u00a0 But the most entertaining performance comes from Stan Cooper \u2013 generally a rather wooden actor – who seems to be having fun as the spliff smoking, whiskey drinking nutter Steward (a character who seems to have been intended as a cross between Gian Maria Volonte’s Indio from For a Few Dollars More <\/strong>and, bizarrely, <\/strong>William S Burroughs).\u00a0 He also gets to wear the same famously incongruous leopard skin poncho as Lang Jeffries in Duel in the Eclipse <\/strong>(which was also co-directed by Merino and written by the same team of Arrigo and Enrico Columbo and Mar\u00eda del Carmen Mart\u00ednez Rom\u00e1n).\u00a0 Not at all bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite the cheeky title, Jose Luis Merino’s Spaghetti Western More Dollars for the MacGregors wasn’t really an attempt to rip off Franco Giraldi’s box office smashes Seven Guns for the MacGregors (66) and Up the MacGregors (67). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[1033,1031,1035,1032,1034],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3175"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3175"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3181,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3175\/revisions\/3181"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}