Kill Them All and Come Back Alone (Italian: Ammazzali tutti e torna solo; Spanish: Mátalos y vuelve) is a 1968 Italian–Spanish Western film directed by Enzo G. Castellari. Chuck Connors headlines an ensemble cast that also includes Frank Wolff, Franco Citti, Leo Anchóriz, Giovanni Cianfriglia, Alberto Dell'Acqua and Hercules Cortez. No woman is seen in the entire movie.
The story centers around a gang of robbers, whose boss (Connors) is tasked by a Confederate captain (Wolff) with stealing gold from a Union fort, before wiping out all of his men to save on their share of the booty. The film has earned notice as one of the genre's most action-oriented examples. It is a spiritual successor to Vado... l'ammazzo e torno (), another heist-themed Western made the previous year by Castellari, writer Tito Carpi and producer Edmondo Amati.
Synopsis
During the American Civil War, Clyde MacKay has recruited a group of criminals, each gifted with a specific physical ability or fighting technique. The gang is summoned to a Confederate town and hired to steal the $1 million in gold secretly stored by Union troops inside Todos Santos, an old mission they ostensibly use as a gunpowder repository. However, Confederate intelligence captain Lynch decrees that, once MacKay's men have helped him fulfill his orders, he is to "kill them all and come back alone". Lynch leads the group on their mission, where brawls, gunfights and more double crosses will soon unfold.
Cast
MacKay's crew
- Chuck Connors as Clyde MacKay, the mastermind
- Franco Citti as Hoagy, the boleador
- Leo Anchóriz as Deker, the pyrotechnician
- Giovanni Cianfriglia as Blade, the knife thrower
- Alberto Dell'Acqua as Kid, the acrobat
- Hercules Cortez as Bogard, the strongman
Military personnel
- Frank Wolff as Captain Lynch
- Antonio Molino Rojo as Sergeant
- Furio Meniconi (as Men Fury) as Buddy
- Alfonso Rojas as Checkpoint Sergeant
- Ugo Adinolfi as Lieutenant McKenzie
- John Bartha as Prison Camp Captain
Sergio Citti, Vincenzo Maggio, Osiride Pevarello and Pietro Torrisi also appear in stunt roles as soldiers.
Production
The film was a co-production between Edmondo Amati's Fida Cinematografica of Rome, and Felix Duran Aparicio's Centauro Films of Madrid. Chuck Connors was announced as the lead in May 1968. The star pitched the film, whose English working title was reported as Kill and Come Back, as "kind of a Civil War Dirty Dozen". Filming was announced to start on June 15 at Cinecittà studios in Italy. Due to the popularity of his show The Rifleman, which was still airing in the country, the actor reportedly drew a crowd of one thousand Italian youths upon his airport arrival. On Sundays, Connors, an ex-Major Leaguer, gave baseball lessons to local children at a Rome public park.
Filming continued over the summer with location work in the Spanish provinces of Madrid and Almería. In Madrid, the town of Colmenar Viejo, the Poblado Lega y Michelena set in nearby Dehesa de Navalvillar and the Alberche river were visited.
The film was shot using the Techniscope format. Behind-the-scenes coverage was featured in a contemporary documentary dedicated to Spaghetti Westerns called Western, Italian Style, which was narrated by co-star Frank Wolff. In the U.K., the film was subjected to undisclosed cuts and received an X rating (which at the time meant no admittance under 16). The Spanish version was also shorter by about 9 minutes.
Theatrical
In Italy, the film was released by Fida Cinematografica, who hyped it as "The biggest western of 1969". In Spain, it was distributed by Ízaro Films. It opened on 29 September 1969 in Madrid, and on 30 April 1970 in Barcelona.
In the U.K., the film was released through Rank Film Distributors, It debuted on 13 November 1969 in London, and on 14 December 1969 in Manchester. who opened it on 19 May 1970 in the Los Angeles metro, and on 5 August in the New York metro. Fanfare used it as the second feature of a drive-in double bill with their in-house production, the biker film The Losers.
Reception
Box office
In both Italy and Spain, the film was a commercial success. In the former, it drew an estimated 2,100,000 admissions, a sizeable audience, albeit not as strong as that of Vado... l'ammazzo e torno. In the latter, it registered an official 1,466,924 admissions. Louise Boyka of the Schenectady Gazette praised the film's action, writing that heist was pulled off in "amazing fashion, with some of the most spectacular stunt scenes that I have seen in ages". She noted that Connors' "pretty heartless" character differed from his usual good guy roles, "but then this is spaghetti western, filmed in Rome, and morality is never a strong point in these epics."
In Italy, communist paper L'Unità disapproved of the film's amorality, pointing to its "sad and depressing vicissitudes", and adding that its colors and widescreen only exacerbated the characters' small-mindedness. La Stampa took the opposite stance. Calling it "a western with irony", it found that the title did not fully reflect its content, which continued the director's habit of "facetiously exploring certain situations that are usually solely presented through the prism of ferocity". It deemed the actors "all worthy of praise, especially Connors and Wolff". Massimo Bertarelli of Il Giornale called it "[a]lmost passable, despite the grim title, [...] and endowed with a surprising self-irony. In the first part it actually is an enjoyable film, then the pace becomes asthmatic, even though you need a calculator to keep count of the deceased."
Phil Hardy's book The Western, part of William Morrow's The Film Encyclopedia collection, called it "[a] superior variant on The Dirty Dozen", adding that "[t]he stunt work is more realistic than usual and, together with the film's fast pace, helps paper over the gaping cracks in the script." Leonard Maltin was most positive, hailing the film as a "[h]ighly entertaining, action-packed spaghetti Western with nonstop fistfights, gun battles, and explosions, plus some clever plot twists."
Home media
In Spain, the film received a VHS from distributor Bilig in 1986. In Italy, distributor Multivision released a VHS with a 2002 date under the Number One Video label. Multivision also issued a DVD with a 2001 date,
An English-language DVD was released by U.S. preservationists Wild East Productions as Volume 23 of their Spaghetti Western Collection in 2008. A Blu-ray offered by U.S. distributor Kino Lorber in 2020 features both an English-language cut and an Italian cut, with minimal differences between the two.
Soundtrack
The film's original score was composed by Francesco De Masi, and combines his Italian and American influences. It was issued on LP by Italian label Beat Records in 1978, on a split album with the score for Vado... l'ammazzo e torno (Any Gun Can Play). Select tracks have appeared on several CD compilations dedicated to De Masi's works or Western films in general, before the full tracklist was re-issued by Beat Records as part of their limited edition Gold Series in 2011.
The song "Gold", a vocal version of the film's main theme performed by Ettore Raoul Lovecchio under the mononym Raoul, was selected for the Tritone d'Oro, a film song contest broadcast by Italian public broadcaster RAI, but lost to the Italian version of "The Windmills of Your Mind" from The Thomas Crown Affair.