Minnesota Clay (1964)

Too restrained for my liking, 18 November 2005

Wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, Minnesota Clay (Cameron Mitchell) escapes to seek revenge against the man who refused to testify at his trial. He finds that his target, Fox (Georges Riviere), has made himself sheriff of Clay's hometown. Fox and his band of thugs run the town with an iron fist and generally terrorize the citizens. To make matters worse, Clay is slowly going blind. How can Clay ever hope to get his revenge if he can't see his target?

Sergio Corbucci is one of my favorite Spaghetti Western directors. If it weren't for Sergio Leone, Corbucci might be remembered as the best director the genre ever produced. Some of his movies like Django, The Great Silence, Companeros, and The Hellbenders are among my favorites. Sadly, I cannot include Minnesota Clay on this list. It's an earlier example of the genre and it shows. The movie plays more like a traditional American Western that just happens to have been filmed in Europe. It lacks a lot of the over-the-top violence that I associate with the Spaghetti Western. While there are set-pieces I enjoy (like Clay's meeting with the Mexicans or any scene with Ethel Rojo), as a whole, it never draws me in the way Corbucci's other movies do.

I've always been a big fan of Cameron Mitchell. He was more than capable of giving the kind of performance that should have been perfect for one of Corbucci's Spaghetti Westerns. But like most everything else in the movie, he comes across as far too restrained. It's too bad this movie wasn't made later in the Spaghetti Western cycle. I would have really enjoyed seeing Mitchell in a Django type film.

5/10