The Hellbenders

The civil war is over but Colonel Jonas does not accept it. With his three sons he robs a convoy and takes a large sum of money. The only safe way to move it is a coffin: they hide it inside and set out as a family carrying a soldier killed in the war home for burial. They also hire a woman to weep beside it. The subject is not the robbery but the lie having to be carried. The coffin can be opened at any checkpoint, the hired woman can talk at any moment, and as the road lengthens the group begins to suspect one another. The pressure comes from inside the party, not outside. The form belongs to the darker branch of the Italian western. The landscape is dry and empty, none of the characters is sympathetic, and the violence is abrupt. Sergio Corbucci's films of this period deliberately broke the genre's heroic template. The central choice is notable: the protagonist is openly a Confederate officer who refuses to accept defeat, and the narrative vindicates him nowhere. The father holds total power over his sons, and the disintegration starts there. Joseph Cotten plays the colonel and Norma Bengell the hired woman, with Aldo Sambrell in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian westerns and bleak genre work. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a hero; there is nobody to support here, and that is deliberate.