Tigon British Film Productions' attempt to move into the big time, with Hollywood talent behind and in front of the camera, and making a Hollywood genre i.e. Western. It didn't really work - Westerns were going out of fashion in the US and I'm not sure audiences really liked Raquel Welch when she was the actual star of a film; they seemed to prefer her as a supporting character or female lead to a male star.
There's a perfectly serviceable plot - she plays a woman of the West who is widowed and raped by a particularly nasty group of bandits and goes looking for revenge. She is tutored by an experienced bounty hunter on how to hold a gun and shoot people, and who is killed towards the end, leaving the girl alone to finished her task. This sort of plot was used by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill and Django Unchained (and to a lesser extent Inglorious Basterds) - but in those films you felt the hot blood lust of revenge; you don't here.
Baddies in Westerns from this time were usually loathsome, and to be honest not a lot of fun to be around - they are also hard to tell apart, as played by Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam and Strother Martin. Robert Culp is good as the bounty hunter; I also enjoyed seeing Christopher Lee as a gunsmith, Diana Dors (very good casting) as a madame, and Stephen Boyd as a mysterious preacher.
Welch isn't bad - she's very pretty but its' not much of a character: there's no mystery, or past, or complexity. I kept wondering why they didn't make her something interesting to start off with - like a school teacher, or retired prostitute, or former church woman... something to show a journey. As it is when we first see her she gets raped, then angry, then shoots people. She doesn't even have much of a relationship with Culp. She's very good looking (some stills were taken of her on set which have become semi famous) but the whole rape thing ruined her sexiness for me.
There were lots of story problems too - a random, unmotivated shoot out with some convenient westerns, the three baddies all played the same character, no real surprises or reversals apart from Culp's death, no sheriff on their trail or family of Welch or variation in deaths.
Maybe Burt Kennedy, who specialised in Westerns that were comic and/or about tortured Randolph Scott, was the wrong person to direct this. Or behind the scenes fighting hurt it. I wish Michael Reeves, who had long wanted to make a Western, and whose The Sorcerers had been produced by Welch's husband (who produced this), had gotten his hands on this - he might have given it the full blooded treatment it needed.
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