‘Death Rides a Horse’ or — Delightfully Derivative?

Guilio Petroni’s ‘Death Rides a Horse’ (1967) might just be the most unoriginal movie ever made so to call it a sort of ‘Sergio Leone’s Greatest Hits on 45’ would be pretty accurate. Yet this shouldn’t come as a surprise considering how much DNA Petroni’s film shares with Leone’s output, which includes everything from the same composer (Ennio Morricone), cast members (Lee Van Cleef, Mario Brega, Luigi Pistilli, etc) and, most importantly, screenwriter (Luciano Vincenzoni), so if it frequently feels like you’re watching repurposed ideas from ‘For a Few Dollars More’ (1965) or ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966) that’s because you probably are. The good news is none of that matters because this movie is a hell of a lot of fun and possesses two big differences from Leone that might, just might, give it a bit of an edge.

Bill (John Phillip Law) sees his entire family massacred one night when only a child. He doesn’t know who the men are but glimpses various identifying items and features on them — a distinctive tattoo, a scar, a peculiar pendent, unusual spurs. He spends the following years training to become an expert gunslinger and now he’s an adult he’s determined to track down and kill these murderers no matter what it takes.

Ryan (Lee Van Cleef) is an aging gunfighter recently released from prison after spending fifteen years framed for robbery. He knows who set him up and is determined to track these bastards down and demand fifteen thousand dollars from each of them in compensation — one thousand dollars for each year lost — no matter what it takes.

Nobody is surprised when it turns out they’re both looking for the same men.

This results in the first big similarity with Leone because Bill and Ryan forge a father/son bond very much like the one between Cleef and Eastwood in ‘FAFDM’. It’s a little more playfully antagonistic in nature as despite both men wanting revenge on the same villians Ryan can’t let Bill kill the gang until he’s got his money, which leads to these two alternatively helping then hindering the other.

Yet this also results in the first big difference with Leone as although John Phillip Law’s Bill is basically a facsimile of Eastwood’s Manco (i.e. laconic, young, handsome, deadly) the loss of his family gives him a more human dimension than the cooly unemotional Man with No Name ever had meaning that, by the end, there’s a genuine emotional punch to this father/son relationship.

The second big difference with Leone is in terms of pacing because ‘Death Rides a Horse’ is just under two hours long and packs a hell of a lot into those 114 minutes, whereas you can bet your ass that if Leone had directed this it would be pushing the three-hour mark. Petroni cuts straight to the chase with the material and completely resists any of Leone’s indulgences, so there’s no lingering shots on faces, drawn out build-ups of tension or simply blissing out for ages to its own beautiful Morricone score. He keeps everything moving.

So what we might miss out on in terms of a grand operatic style is more than compensated for by a blistering pace as this film barrels along like nobody’s business. And this is possibly the film’s biggest strength — it’s a HUGE load of fun.

So yeah, ‘Death Rides a Horse’ is wholly unoriginal and completely derivative but it’s also extremely entertaining, so don’t be surprised if you occasionally find yourself thinking it might, at certain moments, be even more enjoyable than Leone. That’s because, at times, it is.