A Reason To Live, A Reason To Die

A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die (Una Ragione Per Vivere E Una Per Morire) (1972)

Runtime: 113 minutes

Directed by: Tonino Valerii

Starring: James Coburn, Bud Spencer, Telly Savalas, Georges Geret

From: Several companies, including Atlantida Films

Here is a random film I discovered on a site I just stumbled upon last week which is tremendous for seeing all sorts of real obscure things. Of course I won't mention what it is as the more that know about it, the more it's likely that it'll get shut down by The Man. I picked that out by the title being cool then I noticed who was in the cast and saw the plot, and it sounded like something I should check out. It's from Spain/Italy/France/West Germany, but it's mainly Italian and it was filmed in Spain, like so many Spaghetti Westerns were. After the plot description, what I wrote about it on Letterboxd:

The aforementioned plot, from the IMDb: “Branded a coward for surrendering his New Mexico fort to the Confederates without firing a shot, a Union colonel attempts to redeem himself by leading a band of condemned prisoners on a suicide mission to recapture it.” Yeah, there is a reason why the Colonel (Coburn) did such a thing and yes, it does sound similar to The Dirty Dozen.

I won't go into the details on how I discovered the film (before finding it I hadn't heard of the movie before) but as it fits into the theme of me watching foreign films for the month-sadly real life has gotten in the way of seeing more to put on the list, but the last few days of the month I'll see a few appropriate movies to make the list look better.

I checked it out as I enjoyed its English title, the main three people being James Coburn, Telly Savalas and Bud Spencer, and the plot being clearly inspired by The Dirty Dozen (one leader rounds up criminals to do an almost impossible task; here, Colonel Coburn gets some crooks together to do a raid on a fort that he used to be the head of before he lost it in what was seen a cowardly surrendering fashion, but of course there's a reason behind it). It sounded pretty promising.

While I am disappointed it wasn't awesome as I had hoped-until the action-packed cool finale-which at least did deliver-it at least wasn't bad. It's just that it was in a low gear much of the time and the raid does help elevate it to a 3 star rating. A lot of it is what you'd expect (the crooks not getting along with Coburn, and that sort of thing).

Really, there isn't too much else to say about it besides that it was filmed in Spain by (mainly the) Italians so you'll likely recognize some of the locations if you're familiar with that particular genre. Oh, and if you ever wanted to see Bud Spencer give someone the raspberries and later threaten to moon someone... actually, considering his film career that may have happened more than once, but it does happen here too.

I'll return tomorrow night.