Thanks for the memories!

Fantastic!

Excellent but underrated film

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

See it – Kind of "trippy" in parts, which is to be expected for a western made during the 70's. But this one's exciting, action-packed, violent, and stars the talented Richard Harris. Harris is possibly the most underrated actor in film history. In this western classic, he plays an Irish sheriff who goes after a band of outlaws who have murdered his family. He tracks them down one by one seeking revenge. The movie starts out uniquely with the first few minutes of the film's dialogue accompanied by a slideshow of pictures. Then, the first gunfight explodes onto the screen and the pace never lets up until the end. This tragic movie is definitely not a feel-good story. But it begins and ends with a bang. 3.5 out of 5 action rating.

An opening scene is one that will make the anti-gun group proud. The sheriff (a sober Richard Harris) explains that guns beget guns, etc. But when a group of super-nasties kill his school marm wife, and young son, it's a whole different story.It's vengeance time and the next hour or so has to do with the sheriff on a one-man quest to find the head baddie (Rod Taylor relishing the role) and the chase takes us into Mexico and a small village where, usually, nothing much happens.What happens in this flick is brutality piled on brutality, and violence up the ying-yang. Look at someone cross-eyed and you've had it mister.There is the requisite prostitute with the requisite heart of gold and, by the way, some of the best acting comes from her little girl who was fathered by Taylor. She really looks scared --- well, you know the phrase.So, the story is standard stuff, but it will hold your attention. The scenery is neat, the 'borrowed' music is neat and, for you lovers of violence, this is heaven on film although, to be honest, it is not as gross as you may have expected, since the films of Fuller are 'full-er' violence.The moral to the story? Revenge is not always sweet. Would the Lone Ranger have done it this way?

Pacifist sheriff Richard Harris rethinks his civilizes ways, when his wife and son are murdered by ex-Confederate lowlife Rod Taylor and his nasty band of cutthroats. Abandoned by his posse at the border of Mexico, he goes it alone, butting heads with Al Lettieri (who's great in this), his idealistic Mexican counterpart, who wants to bring Taylor in alive for a local murder.A fast pace, plentiful action, good photography of beautiful Mexican locations, and a colorful cast of villains, that include William Smith as a disfigured brute, Neville Brand as an unpleasant cretin with a block of railroad track for a hand (!), and Paul Benjamin as a cultured, black dandy, make this worth watching for fans of hard-boiled, macho film-making.The film's message is a bit murky though. It seems as if the movie is demonstrating the dehumanizing effect of Harris' obsessive search for vengeance, which turns him into a man to be pitied.However, despite Mexican lawman Lettieri's great strength, dignity, and honor, his sense of true justice makes him look like less of a man too, when in the end he's forced by his rigid ideology to attempt to release the truly vile, smug killer and ends up shooting Harris in the name of the law.The film is either trying to have it both ways or telling us to choose our own morality!Like most of his western films (A Man Called Horse, Man In The Wilderness, Unforgiven), Harris takes an inhuman amount of physical punishment in this grim, sometimes mean-spirited, and excessively violent action/adventure, that somehow managed to sneak by with a PG rating!

A very simple, old-fashioned Western about a man of peace destroyed on a trail of vengeance, with no particular nuance or grace and nothing to mark it as a product of the early 70s except lots of blood squibs. Still, DEADLY TRACKERS reminds us that in Hollywood, anything can happen. Even a Richard Harris-Al Lettieri buddy movie.Rod Taylor is a happy surprise as a brutal killer, unregenerate and nasty, unrecognizable from the pretty Englishman in GIANT who goes fishing for Elizabeth Taylor and ends up hooking - do you remember? - Carolyn Craig. William Smith's vicious idiot, Schoolboy, is perhaps his best acting work outside that monologue as Conan's father, and his fellow war hero Neville Brand is weird and big enough to wear a piece of train track instead of a hand, which is at least interesting, if unlikely. But Harris pretty much walks through this one, apparently numbed by all those underperforming Westerns that preceded it (though he can't make it all the way through this one without his MAN CALLED HORSE headband); maybe he saw that his career was headed for the rickety CASSANDRA CROSSING. And the wonderful Al Lettieri is handcuffed by a nice-guy role that disallows his greatest strengths: sadism, menace, barbarity.Gabriel Torres' photography is okay, but the story (by original director Sam Fuller and Lukas Heller) moves along in fits and starts, probably because its multiple other directors were fired by Harris, who manages not to appear drunk through most of the picture. TV director Barry Shear does a decent job with the final product; I'm not a big fan of Sam Fuller anyway and am not certain that the movie would have been better if he had been allowed to finish it. But Shear's (perhaps unwilling) choice of opening with a terrible, unnecessary V.O. scroll and dialog over "still" photos of town life, is a bizarre and not very good one. Then the action starts, and it's true 70s violence, with children's heads stomped by horses and women shot in the face so close to camera that blood spatters the lens. This is the kind of movie that made the MPAA rethink some of its decisions and reduce the violence quotient in PG pictures.The best thing about this movie is the music it appropriates from THE WILD BUNCH (a choice likely made by Warner Brothers due to budgetary concerns after the numerous headaches associated with its difficult star), and this great music isn't even appropriate - Jerry Fielding's epic score, itself reminiscent of Elmer Bernstein's work on MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, is ill-suited to an intimate, low-end quickie that would have been better served by a dirge.