Day of Anger

Scott is the town's refuse collector, an orphan nobody treats as a person. Then a practised gunfighter arrives, takes him on, and teaches him both how to shoot and how to feel nothing. Tonino Valerii builds it as a master and apprentice story where the teaching itself is the subject: while showing the boy how to survive, the man is also remaking him in his own image. Lee Van Cleef carries menace and fatherhood at once, and Giuliano Gemma plays the transformation physically. Riz Ortolani's score sets the rhythm. The reckoning at the end is one of the coldest in the spaghetti western. Who it is for: viewers who like spaghetti westerns and mentor and pupil stories. Who it is not for: anyone who needs a morally clear hero.