A Long Ride from Hell

When a shipment of gold is stolen from the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, Mike Sturges (Steve Reeves) and his brother Roy (Sergio De Vecchi) are framed for the crime. Thrown into the hellish Yuma State Penitentiary, the brothers are forced to work hard labour under a sadistic guard, Bill Savage (Nello Pazzafini), who has a penchant for torturing prisoners. Consequently, it’s not long before Roy is dead and Mike is leading a prison break in his quest for justice. Helped in turn by a good-hearted prostitute (Rosalba Neri) and his old sweetheart (Silvana Venturelli), Mike sets about hunting down the men who framed him. It’s a danger- fraught mission that brings him into conflict with a corrupt sheriff (Mimmo Palmara), a duplicitous old friend (Wayde Preston) and a gang of vicious bad guys.

As well as being his only Spaghetti Western, A Long Ride From Hell holds the distinction of being Steve Reeves’s (Hercules, Goliath and the Barbarians) final film. With early retirement from action films reportedly being forced upon him by a recurrent problem with a shoulder injury, it seems that Reeves was determined to fulfil an ambition to star in a Western feature before bringing his acting career to a premature close.

Reeves proceeded to buy the film rights to Gordon Shirreffs’s book The Judas Gun (1964) and set about co-writing the screenplay that became A Long Ride From Hell with Roberto Natale. The star also acted as the film’s producer and he managed to assemble a cast and crew that featured some quality talent genre-wise. Budget-wise, this show looks to be a lower-middle tier genre entry but the spirited efforts of its seasoned cast and crew result in a fun and likeable film that is able to transcend a good number of its budgetary limitations. Fast-paced and entertaining, A Long Ride From Hell serves as a decent enough cinematic swan song for Reeves.

It’s good to report that Reeves actually makes for a pretty good Spaghetti Western protagonist: the impassive and stoic approach that he employs here suits the genre perfectly. Although he is a vengeance-seeker and circumstances dictate that he must kill the requisite number of bad guys along the way, fans of Reeves will likely be glad to hear that Mike Sturges ultimately believes in judicial justice and he remains more of a hero figure than an anti-hero. The same fans will also be pleased to hear that the show’s script allows Reeves to legitimately flex his famous muscles onscreen. Early on he’s seen wrestling a bull to the ground while working on his ranch and he works up a further sweat during the gruelling rock pounding sequences at the Yuma State Penitentiary. Elsewhere he gets stuck into a multitude of well choreographed fistfights, though he remains convincing enough with six-guns and rifles too.

But this flick isn’t just a one-man show. Reeves receives good support from a whole host of familiar faces here. Wayde Preston and Mimmo Palmara are convincing as a pair of particularly slimy villains. Sexy Rosalba Neri has an unusually sympathetic role as a hard done by but helpful prostitute while genre bad guy Nello Pazzafini (Ben and Charlie) excels as Sturges’s brutal jailer. Pazzafini’s approach to telegraphing his evilness via subtle but meaningful changes in his facial expressions is very reminiscent of Lee Van Cleef’s craft here. Sergio Leone regular Aldo Sambrell pops up briefly as an opportunist Mexican thug and popular genre bit-part players Spartaco Conversi and Bruno Corazzari make significant appearances too.

While his blocking and framing look a little rushed at times, director Camillo Bazzoni does an adequate enough job for the most part. This isn’t the most stylish of genre entries but popular genre cinematographer Enzo Barboni provides Bazzoni with generally solid support (Barboni went on to enjoy huge success as the writer and director of They Call Me Trinity [1970]). Curiously, Bazzoni and Barboni appear to have consciously elected to periodically shoot into the sun and the assortment of unusual back lighting effects that this produces gives the film an interesting and fairly unique look. Their approach ultimately results in exterior scenes that sometimes possess a quite moody, muted and autumnal colour palette that seemingly serves to reflect the highly duplicitous nature of the villainous actions that unfold on screen and the desperate responses that these actions in turn provoke.

Speaking of exteriors, A Long Ride From Hell makes very good use of some familiar locations in Almeria, Spain (numerous stunning mountain ranges are employed as imposing backdrops and the iconic town of Agua Caliente [in reality, the town of Los Albaricoques] from Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More [1965] makes an appearance too) and Italy (Rome’s magnificent Magliana quarry is the site of the Yuma State Penitentiary’s hard labour camp and local autumnal forests are also used to great effect, bringing to mind the finale of Tonino Cervi’s vengeance-themed Spaghetti Western Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die [1968] which also starred Wayde Preston).

Sturges’s escape from prison involves a fairly brief but lovingly shot trek across a sun-baked desert, which plays like an homage to the desert trek found in Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly [1966]. Sturges’s revenge mission also takes him to a number of different but pleasingly busy Western towns and Bazzoni fills their streets with interesting extras and details. Genre stalwart Carlo Savina’s soundtrack score features a suitably rousing main title song and a really beautiful violin-led piece that appears during the desert trek sequence. Overall, Savina’s score isn’t quite consistent enough to be considered the composer’s best genre work but it gets the job done nonetheless.

Naturally, there’s plenty of action to be had here and most of it is well staged. The show opens with the callous massacre of Sturges’s ranch hands as they round up horses in the wilderness. It’s Sturges’s subsequent investigation of this crime that places him and Roy close to the site of the train robbery, which itself features some callous and brutal gunplay. Indeed, as Spaghetti Westerns go, this is an unusually bloody — if not gory — film. The prison break sequence has a pleasingly spontaneous and frenetic quality about it. When his fellow prisoners initially try to get him involved in their escape plans, Sturges turns them down flat but when the prison guards subsequently start tormenting him with cruel jibes about his brother’s death, Sturges snaps and all hell breaks loose.

The film’s finale features a decent enough running shootout, some good stunt work and plenty of gunplay, which results in several villainous henchmen biting the dust. However, this frenetic sequence doesn’t lead into a climax centred around a Sergio Leone-inspired final duel. As befits the final action scene of Steve Reeves’s career, our hero decides to take on Wayde Preston’s duplicitous Mayner in a hard fought fistfight and he gives the villain the extended battering he so richly deserves. Displaying one last feat of strength, Sturges hauls the prone body of Mayner onto his shoulders and carts him off alive so that real judicial justice can be served.