#534: Cemetery Without Crosses
Rare “baguette” western says so much with so little
Initial release: January 25, 1969
Director: Robert Hossein
When it comes to Eurowesterns, Italy is — or at least was — the dominant force, cranking out over five hundred westerns of varying quality between 1961 and 1977. But as I’ve talked about in the past, they weren’t the only ones — both sides of Germany were getting in on the action, as was the United Kingdom, even Yugoslavia and Finland. France also played a role in the production of a handful of films — Red Sun was primarily a French production, after all; but I don’t know that there’s quite a film in this genre that embodies the French filmmaking style of the 1960s quite like Robert Hossein’s Cemetery Without Crosses.
Unreleased in the English-speaking world until 2015, Cemetery Without Crosses, or Une corde, un Colt (“one rope, one Colt”) as it’s known in France, shows its age as the Blu-Ray release doesn’t seem to have had much of a restoration, with lots of damage and yellow marks. Nevertheless, it sports a generally very good English dub, which admittedly wouldn’t have needed a lot of work considering how little dialogue is actually in this film.
While on its surface Hossein’s film hits all the usual notes: an abusive wealthy landowner bullies his neighbors and steals their property, a lone gunslinger gets hired to set things aright, the high desert is vast and unforgiving, and so on — it stands out in its directing and overall sense of atmosphere. It’s a taciturn film, with maybe thirty lines of dialogue in the whole movie (an exaggeration, but not much of one.) Hossein (who also stars as the black-gloved gunslinger Manuel) prefers to say as much as he can with very little; entire scenes will consist of characters just staring at each other. While from this description it sounds like a stereotypically pretentious art film — and in some ways, it is that — in practice these moments are incredibly effective, for example the female lead returning to her home only to find the villainous family waiting for her in the darkness of her house, illuminated by the lantern. The camera slowly passes along the faces the men, before turning to the heroine, who stares at them as a single tear rolls down her cheek. It’s a far more effective moment than any sort of dialogue could have managed.
While the main driver of the film is Manuel, an eccentric retired gunslinger who specifically wears a single black glove before he draws his gun, it’s an old friend of his, Maria, who talks him into taking down the cruel Roberts family. There’s an unspoken awkwardness between him and Maria, as they and Maria’s murdered husband Ben formed a trio of onetime friends; it’s implied that Manuel’s self-imposed exile in a lonely ghost town was because Maria chose Ben over him. Maria herself is only interested in shaming the Roberts into acknowledging what they’ve done, but one thing leads to another and by the end of the film, almost everyone is dead, a fitting conclusion to a film that is pervaded by a sense of loss and tragedy and vast emptiness. Even a somewhat comedic scene (directed by none other than Sergio Leone, who was visiting the set for a day and to whom the film is dedicated to) feels sinister and disquieting. Hossein shies away from the usual bloody messes and lurid sexuality of spaghetti westerns (in one moment, a rape is lightly implied but never shown) but the film is no less dark and ruinously hopeless, arguably even moreso than most of its Italian competitors. The Eurowestern mecca of Almeria, Spain (a popular spot for westerns, similar to how John Ford liked to use Monument Valley for his cowboy flicks) seems even more bleak and isolating than in other films, filled with a kind of menacing grandeur as dry hills rise in the distance behind a lonely cemetery (which incidentally does have crosses, but don’t let little details like that stop you.)
A lot of the stuff this film does wouldn’t quite work without the score, composed by Hossein’s father André, famously known as the first composer of Persian descent to achieve international recognition. The elder Hossein’s soundtrack is largely simple and undramatic guitar, which is used extensively throughout, especially in tragic scenes to underscore just how common and everyday such scenes were in the Old West. On occasion, the score does pick up in volume, largely to reprise the theme song, another hearty ballad (by 60s-era pop singer Scott Walker) doing its best to ape Django and its stirring opening theme. It doesn’t really work for this movie, not just because the lyrics don’t really fit but because this is otherwise such a melancholy, quiet film that it feels like crashing a funeral with a polka band.
This is Hossein’s only western, which is a shame because Cemetery Without Crosses is a masterpiece of Eurowestern gloom. But it shows that he understood what the western really is as a genre: not a narrative of conquest and pioneering, but of hardship and grief in an unforgiving wasteland, where there are no easy victories, and sometimes, everyone just dies.
