CHARLEY-ONE-EYE
DVD. Odeon.

Charley-One-Eye is that rarest of things, a British Western. But unlike lighthearted efforts like The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw or Carry on Cowboy, this isn’t played for laughs – instead, it’s a surprisingly gritty, often unsettlingly violent story, dripping with racial tension and nihilism.

Richard Roundtree plays a black soldier, on the run in the desert after killing an officer (who had caught Roundtree in bed with his wife). Stumbling upon a crippled Indian (Roy Thinnes), he at first takes the man captive and then forms an uneasy bond with him – both outsiders and outcasts, the pair make a connection, though you suspect violence is never far away. And violence arrives, firstly in the form a couple of Mexican bandits, and then with bounty hunter Nigel Davenport, who captures the black man and tries to get the Indian to join him as a witness to Roundtree’s crimes.

Don Chaffey had shown his ability to make desert landscapes seem harsh and unforgiving in One Million Years BC, but here the locations seem especially desolate. The only sign of civilisation we see throughout the whole film is a deserted, run-down church, where the pair hide out. But with the rotting crucifixes, crumbling building and relentless sun, it’s not hard to see that these two renegades are, in many ways, already in Hell.

Seen today, it’s surprising just how savage this 1973 movie is. There’s a nasty dog fight that I’m surprised didn’t upset the British censors and some brutal chicken killing that will certainly distress more delicate viewers; equally gory are the killings, with extraordinary blood spurts. And I imagine that some people will be shocked by the racial abuse that runs through the film – Davenport’s dialogue is mostly racial epithets. All this gives the film a certain frisson that other westerns of the time have lost, and certainly makes this a film that won’t be to all tastes.

But the central performances are excellent – Roundtree, as a fairly unlikeable and somewhat sociopathic ant-hero is a million miles from the super cool Shaft, while Thinnes, with rotten teeth and fingernails, is barely recognisable. Davenport, meanwhile, makes for as foul a villain as you could hope for.

Previously wallowing in obscurity, Charley-One-Eye is pretty essential viewing for fans of bleak Westerns and edgy Seventies cinema.

DAVID FLINT

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