Director Burt Kennedy was best known for comic westerns on the affable order of The Rounders (1965) with Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford, The War Wagon (1967) with John Wayne and Kurt Douglas and Support Your Local Sheriff!(1969) with James Garner. Not surprisingly, Hannie Caulder also boasts a high humor quotient, but the mirth mixture schizophrenically shuffles scenes of slapstick and slaughter. Setpieces devoted to the maladroit antics of desperado brothers Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam and Strother Martin (who wear atypical western hats and longcoats that make them look like actors in a site specific production of Waiting for Godot) are played for laughs and counter-balanced by vignettes of mass murder (a bank full of customers and clerks shotgunned at close range, spraying gallons of viscous cosmetic blood that surely must be called Peckinpah Red No. 1) and gang rape. Elsewhere, the production betrays signs of sloppiness (in the curtain warmer, Elam receives a bullet in his left leg, which migrates to his right later in the film before returning home later still) while the script feels padded by extraneous scenes (an attack on a seaside hacienda by grinning Mexican rudos). The cash-strapped production was taken away from Kennedy in post-production; given the lumpy texture of the batter, it's surprising how pleasing a confection Hannie Caulder turns out to be.
The winning pairing of Welch and Culp aside, Hannie Caulder also benefits from an uncharacteristic (and therefore delightful) cameo from horror actor Christopher Lee, then in the bell lap of his run as Hammer Studio's Count Dracula. Sporting a full beard and playing a philosophical Southern gunsmith who has found peace and happiness raising a handful of halfbreed children on a stretch of Mexican beach, Lee is relaxed and charismatic in his few scenes and his character is missed when the plot leaves him behind. Popping up in bits are Stephen Boyd (the Ben-Hur star contributes a beguiling, entirely wordless performance as a black-clad bounty hunter with a ministerial air) and former British bombshell Diana Dors (who walks through a brief semi-comic scene as a blousy Lone Star madam whose bordello loses a window and a paying customer to Hannie's vengeance). Ken Thorne's rousing score is another asset (although one smells the meddling of the producers when Thorne's muscular orchestrations are dialed up under Bobby Hanna's closing vocal) and Edward Scaife's work behind the camera is every bit the equal of his photography of Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967) or Jack Cardiff's Dark of the Sun (1968), leavening grimy and gory close-ups with gorgeous panoramas of Andalusian landscapes that are, like Hannie Caulder, as breathtaking as they are potential lethal.
Hannie Caulder makes its Region 1 DVD under the auspices of Paramount Pictures (who acquired the film for distribution in 1971) and Olive Films. The original 2.35:1 aspect ratio is preserved in this bare-bones release, which lacks even a theatrical trailer as a bonus feature and is encoded at a miserly eight chapter stops. The image is clear, given a high degree of film grain appropriate for a film of this vintage, and colors are vivid and life-like, despite an intentional color palate that favors earth tones over primary chromatics. Paramount's packaging is rather perfunctory, with a microscopic font size for its pedestrian box copy and a cut-and-paste aspect to the design that would be more at home on a gray market DVD-R. Nonetheless, it's great to have Hannie Caulder available on DVD and to have the chance to see and reevaulate a flawed but worthwhile and unjustly forgotten 70s western.
For more information about Hannie Caulder, visit Olive Films. To order Hannie Caulder, go to TCM Shopping.
by Richard Harland Smith
