California

The Civil War ends and a Union soldier is let out of prison and takes to the road. His travelling companion is shot and hanged in Missouri for horse stealing. California takes it on himself to carry the dead man's belongings back to his family's ranch, and once there he falls for his friend's sister. But the accounts the war left open do not stay closed, and they come back in a way nobody expects. Michele Lupo's film belongs to the late period of the spaghetti western: the hero is no longer gleaming, just a man who came out of a war exhausted. Giuliano Gemma leads it with a young Miguel Bosé alongside. While the Italian western was sliding into clowning in its final years, this one goes the other way, into something slow and melancholy. Not much action, and a great deal left behind.