Saturday, January 29, 2022

Shoot the Sun Down (1978)


Director:  David Leeds

Writers:  David Leeds, Richard Rothstein

Composer:  Ed Bogas

Starring:  Margot Kidder, Geoffrey Lewis, Christopher Walken, Bo Brundin, A Martinez, Ivan Naranjo, Bert Santos, Sacheen Littlefeather, Jorge Cervera Jr., Michael Eiland, Ben Zeller

More info:  IMDb

Tagline:  The American West...a burning desert awash with bushwackers, scalphunters and adventurers in search of forgotten gold...

Plot:  In this adventurous western set in 1836, four misanthropic people band together to find a golden treasure. But as they go out, they begin double and triple-crossing each other in hopes of getting the gold for themselves.




My rating:   6.5/10

Will I watch it again?   No.

I'm gonna want more cow.

After watching the movie I read a few reviews and nearly all of them shit all over it.  It's not THAT bad.  Geez!  The picture looks fantastic!  And with cinematographer Michael Chapman behind the camera, it's no doubt.  A couple of years earlier he shot TAXI DRIVER (1976) and a couple of years later he shot RAGING BULL (1980).  The guy's no slouch.  There are some truly beautiful shots in this picture.  It looks so good at times that you get the idea this film is somewhere in between an arthouse and a Spaghetti Western.  I don't know what you'd call that but I kind of dug it.  


I like the cast with the exception of Walken.  I'm a fan of his but he's just miscast.  I see that he's in the movie but I don't feel it.  He's really out of place in a gritty western  where the great Geoffrey Lewis shares the screen.  Now Lewis knows what movie he's in and he's one of the best things about it.  Kidder did a fine job.  One odd thing about this movie is that it's halfway in that you start to get an idea of what the Captain is up to which ends up being the main thrust of the story. How did he know where to look for the treasure, having traveled from England?  Beats me.  The large gold nugget he has seems to have something to do with it.  Why is it he as a nugget with the same composition as the one Scalphunter (Lewis) has?  No idea.  Maybe I missed something but there are a few little things that would make more sense, on a grander scale, if we could connect the dots more easily.  By leaving big pieces of the puzzle out, I reckon it makes it more 'artsy'.  I'm not looking for deep thought in this one.  With one foot in the arthouse and one in the Spaghetti Western where they'll stab you in the back just for snorin', I'll take the latter.  



When it's all said and done, though, The 100 pretty to look at minutes moved pretty quickly.  It's a shame this was Leeds' sole venture into film making.  I would love to see what else he was capable of.  This is one hell of a start, albeit an uneven one.  Side note:  even with no money left over for the poster budget, surely someone could've done better than what they went with.  Just terrible.



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