Spaghetti Westerns have never been on my cinema radar and although I consider myself a genre aficionado, I’ve largely ignored whatever appeal they have. However, I’m always looking for new areas to explore. After all what’s the point of immersing one’s self in cinema culture if you’re taste is limited. With that in mind, I recently attended a screening of the 1971 British made spaghetti western Hannie Caulder directed by Burt Kennedy and starring American sex symbol Raquel Welch in the title role. The film right from the beginning embraces the shoot-em-up ultra-violent attitude of both 70s commercial film culture and spaghetti westerns complete with bank robberies, gun fights, murder, and mayhem in frontier land. Caulder manages to serve up a nice helping of it all while simultaneously throwing in the proverbial monkey wrench in the form of the smoking hot Welch.
