Walter Rilla | Through the Shattered Lens

During the dying days of the Old West, Clifton, Arizona is a prosperous frontier town. The leaders of the town are wealthy and well-connected and the saloon has a strictly enforced policy when it comes to only allowing in the right people. Frank Talby (Lee Van Cleef), the mysterious man who rides into town one day, is considered to be one of the right people. Scott (Giuliano Gemma) is not. Because he was born out of wedlock, Scott is looked down upon by the townspeople. He makes a pitiful living sweeping the streets and doing odd jobs, all while trying to save up enough money to buy himself a gun.

Talby, who has his own reasons for hating the people of Clifton, takes Scott with him into the saloon. After Scott sees Talby gun down a local roughneck, Scott begs Talby to teach him how to be a gunslinger like him. Talby reluctantly takes Scott under his wing and teaches him how to be a real outlaw. Scott also learns that the town of Clifton was founded by money that stolen during a robbery that Talby originally planned. Talby now wants his money and his revenge. Working with Scott as his enforcer, Talby takes over the town of Clifton.

At first, Scott has everything that he ever wanted. The people who once mocked him now respect him as the second-fasted shot in town. But when Scott’s former boss, Murph (Walter Rilla), reveals that Talby is not as benevolent a mentor as Scott thought he was, the student and teacher turn on each other.

Day of Anger is one of many Spaghetti westerns that featured an older gunslinger taking a younger one under his tutelage. Lee Van Cleef is so confident and sure himself that it’s easy to see why Scott would idolize him. Talby is an interesting character because, as ruthless and cold-blooded as he is, he does seem to sincerely like and care about Scott. They’re both outsiders and they’ve both been screwed over by the town of Clifton and the movie hints that the aging Talby sees the man who he once was when he looks at Scott. When Talby offers up one final lesson to Scott and tells him that once a man starts killing, he can never stop, Van Cleef says it with downbeat resignation, as if he realizes that Scott is now the one who will have to live his entire life alone, trusting no one, and always listening for the sound of a gun being cocked in the shadows. Scott finally gets his gun but now he has to decide whether it was worth losing his humanity and Gemma does a good job playing his character’s arc. Add to that an excellent score from Riz Ortolani and you’ve got a truly superior Spaghetti western.

One final note: Director Tonio Valerii would later be credited for directing another film about an aging gunfighter and his protegee, though there are rumors that the film itself was actually directed by its producer, Sergio Leone. Starring Terrence Hill and Henry Fond, the entertaining My Name is Nobody re-imagines Day of Anger as a comedy.

The 15th film in Mill Creek’s Fabulous Forties box set was The Adventures of Tartu, a British film from 1943.

The Adventures of Tartu opens during the Blitz and follows Captain Terrence Stevenson (Robert Donat), a British explosives expert, as he defuses an unexploded German bomb in the ruins of London. He does it without breaking a sweat or showing the least bit of hesitation. With his clipped accent and his perfectly trimmed mustache, he’s a British hero through and through. He’s so perfectly British that you expect him to start singing the entire score of H.M.S. Pinafore. He’s the epitome of unflappable resilience.

And he’ll need all of that resilience to survive his next mission! It turns out that, as British as he may seem, Captain Stevenson was originally born in Romania and is still fluent in both his native language and German. Because of this, MI6 recruits him to parachute back into Romania, which is now under the control of the Nazis. Stevenson will assume the identity of a recently assassinated Nazi chemist, Jan Tartu. As Tartu, he will then make his way to Czechoslovakia where a member of the resistance will arrange for Stevenson to get a job at a secret Nazi chemical factory. Stevenson will destroy the factory from within.

Unfortunately, Stevenson’s contact is arrested before he can arrange for job to be assigned to Stevenson. When Stevenson (now pretending to be Tartu) arrives in Czechoslovakia, he is instead assigned to work in a munitions factory. In order to eventually win assignment to the chemical factory, Stevenson now has to win the trust of the Nazis without losing the trust of the resistance. That turns out to be more than a little difficult because, as Stevenson quickly discovers, he is now living in a world where no one can be trusted and everyone is paranoid.

(In one of the film’s best sequences, Stevenson is captured by a group of men and struggles to figure out whether he is now a prisoner of the resistance or a prisoner of the Gestapo.)

I’m not going to go into too many other details, beyond saying that The Adventures of Tartu is an effective and twist-filled work of wartime propaganda. What’s interesting is that when the film starts, it almost feels a bit comedic. Stevenson is so extremely British and the initial Nazis that he meets are so extremely buffoonish that it’s hard to take them seriously. But, as the film progresses, it gets more and more serious. In order to accomplish his mission, Stevenson is forced to make some difficult decisions and likable characters suffer as a result. As Stevenson himself spends more time with the Nazis, both he and the viewer discover just how evil they truly are. (Technically, the viewer should already know that the Nazis were evil but it must be remembered that The Adventures of Tartu was made during World War II, at a time when it was still difficult to get accurate information about what was happening in Nazi-occupied Europe.) By the end of the movie, the Nazis are still buffoons but it’s impossible to laugh at them.

I imagine that wartime audiences left The Adventures of Tartu feeling even more committed to destroying the Nazi regime. Meanwhile, modern audiences will watch The Adventures of Tartu and, once again, be reminded of how fortunate we are that the Allies won the war.

You can watch The Adventures of Tartu below!